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Soul Science: Know Your Soul Steve Madison
Copyright © Steve Madison 2020 All rights reserved. 978-1-716-40617-1
Table of Contents Soul Science The Assassin The New Mystery The Life Principle The Giants Science versus Hylomorphism Matter, Form and Information Transcendent versus Immanent Truth Spiritual Hylomorphism Dreams Prime Matter Signate Matter Substantial Forms The Composite The Oak Tree and the Resurrected Body Leibniz and Substantial Forms Causation Being and Becoming The Materialist Mania Aristotle versus Science Primary and Secondary Qualities Transubstantiation Syntax-Semantics Causation Something and Nothing Soul Wavefunctions Conclusion
The Assassin Science has assassinated any meaningful discussion of the soul. It is dismissed as religious nonsense, with no bearing on reality. For the religious and spiritual, the soul is an object of faith or mystical intuition. None of these people can say anything meaningful about it. They use the soul as a vague prop for their self-serving beliefs. They don’t seriously engage with the concept of the soul. It’s something they need to accept for them to get on with believing in all the airy-fairy nonsense they love, but they have absolutely no intention of defining the soul and knowing and understanding exactly what it is. None of these religious and spiritual types can say what the soul is, what is made of, what it is, where it is, why it is, how it relates to the body, how it relates to the universe, how it operates, how it interacts with the laws of science, and so on. They are, how shall we say, studiously ignorant of the soul. They go out of their way to have no idea what it truly is. The last thing they want is to pin it down. Knowing anything about the soul would just get in their way. It would block their path to the bullshit they want to sell themselves and the world. The less they know about the soul, the better for their mystical and faith-based claims that must avoid any interaction with reality at all costs. So, we have materialists who dismiss the soul entirely, and the religious and spiritual who effectively dismiss it by consigning it to the status of the infinitely mysterious, onto which infinite manmade nonsense can then be projected. It’s essential to get the soul back into the intellectual discourse, as it once was in the glory days of philosophy, when philosophy addressed ultimate meaning. That’s exactly what ontological mathematics, with its sinusoidal monadic souls performing ontological Fourier mathematics, provides. The analytic concept of souls as immaterial singularities defined by an exact mathematical formula allows souls to be placed in the middle of science. By the very nature of ontological Fourier mathematics, souls stand as transcendent, non-local entities (autonomous frequency domains) outside local space and time, interacting with the immanent space-time universe using the inherent frequency-space-time relationship built into ontological Fourier mathematics.
Ontological mathematics is the ultimate game-changer. It brings all other games to an end. For the first time, idealism can be combined with realism in mathematico-scientific terms. Mind, not matter, can be shown to be the basis of reality. Matter can be revealed for what it actually is: a construct of mind, a potentiality of mind. In ontological mathematics, the mind is an eternal and necessary basis unit (a monad), comprising a full set of eternal and necessary basis thoughts (sinusoidal waves = frequencies), hence it is inherently and definitionally equipped to perform ontological Fourier mathematics, constructing space-time functions from frequency functions, and that’s all you require to explain the universe, an immanent space-time system, everywhere penetrated by transcendent (singularity) frequency domains (minds). Some people don’t like to use the word “soul” because of how corrupted the concept has become thanks to religion and spirituality. That’s why we often refer instead to just “mind”, or “monad”. However, in this book, we specifically want to discuss the soul and its intellectual treatment. This book is all about restoring a serious discussion of the soul. It starts with the medieval philosophical approach to the soul, championed by two Catholic saints: Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas. Their ideas concerning the soul are more or less unknown today (only scholars would be able to say anything about them … they don’t feature in general cultural discourse at all in the modern world), but serve as an excellent way of getting the uninitiated into the mindset where they can start treating the soul seriously as a fundamental concept of reality … a concept that changes everything. All the nonsense talked about the soul has to end. If you don’t have something mathematical to say about the soul, you have no idea what you are talking about and you should just crawl under a stone and get out of the way of serious people having a serious discussion. The science of the soul has been destroyed by moronic materialists on the one hand, and ludicrous mystics and believers on the other. It’s time for the soul – the monad, the immaterial singularity, the autonomous mathematical calculating organism – to become the central focus of mathematics and thus of science. That’s exactly what ontological mathematics, predicated on Leibnizian monads, delivers. Leibniz, who brought calculus to the world, was right about reality. Newton, his great rival, was wrong. Catastrophically, humanity followed Newton and consigned Leibniz to oblivion. This historic error must be reversed. Humanity cannot achieve its destiny until it rejects Newton, with his empiricist material corpuscles, and embraces Leibniz,
with his rationalist immaterial monads. Reality is not based on lifeless, mindless, purposeless matter. It is based on living, thinking, teleological monadic minds - souls. You
could
not
get
a
more
different
conception
of
reality
than
that
of
ontological mathematics (idealism and rationalism) versus that of science (materialism and empiricism). This is a soul reality of meaning and purpose, not a soulless reality of meaningless randomness. Ask yourself this, what could possibly be a better foundational unit of existence than an individual mind? Given this, all of reality comprises nothing but all of the individual minds in existence, and everything these minds create, both individually and collectively. When all minds act together, they are of course all there is. They are all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing. They are God! The individual soul is the answer to everything, including God. God is simply all souls together, while “the Devil” is all souls apart (leading to conflict, hate and evil). Creation is what all souls together construct to explore their deepest nature and come to selfawareness. Souls start off united, and then create maximum disunity: the Big Bang. Then they dialectically work to come back into unity. They alienate themselves from themselves in order to understand themselves, to come to consciousness of themselves and their purpose and meaning, and then they return to themselves, but at a much higher level, a divine level. They have found themselves. They have come home. The broken mirror of God has reassembled and God can once again see its own reflection and know exactly what and why it is.
The New Mystery “In sum, whereas throughout most of the seventeenth century the self had been a soul, by the end of the eighteenth century it had become a mind, albeit one whose status as a real entity was obscure. One mystery, the immaterial soul, had been dropped. Another, the self as material mind, had emerged to take its place.” – John Barresi and Raymond Martin Philosophy is a game. One mystery is resolved simply by dismissing it because it is not compatible with a new paradigm which has become popular. But then the same issue just becomes a new mystery within the new paradigm. It’s expressed in different terms, but it’s the same problem. So, for example, materialism – the basis of science – excludes immaterial existence from its paradigm, hence the immaterial, immortal soul is abolished and replaced by the mortal mind rooted in the material brain. The new mystery – no less severe than the previous mystery – is how mindless matter can produce mind, how objects can produce subjects, how collections of dead atoms can give rise to living, thinking beings.
You would imagine that the reason the new paradigm was accepted was that it solved the mysteries of the old paradigm. Unfortunately, this isn’t how either philosophy or science works. The new paradigm is accepted for ideological reasons (or in fact just for reasons of personality type and subjective taste and inclination) not because it solves previous mysteries. The new paradigm simply restates the same mystery in a different package, using different jargon. The original mystery does not disappear. Science didn’t solve the problem of the mind. It just claimed that it was a problem of matter rather than something different from matter, and materialists – the sort of people who become scientists – were of course content with that. Science has never refuted the existence of the immaterial soul. All it has done is create a paradigm where immaterial entities cannot be referenced. In the materialist paradigm, only matter is used to explain anything, so the soul, or mind, has to be explained in material terms, but science has never even begun to explain the soul/mind in material terms. It’s a category error to even make the attempt, or believe the attempt is possible. For non-materialists, matter cannot produce mind under any circumstances. It’s a logical impossibility. It’s on a par with claiming that dreams can create dreamers. It has fundamentally inverted the way reality operates. Science doesn’t enter into any debate with non-materialists. Its strategy is to disregard any argument advanced by a non-materialist, not to refute any such argument. All arguments that cannot be framed in materialist terms are paradigmatically excluded by materialism. Science does not explain what other systems fail to explain. Science ignores these problems, or casts them in new terms, which still have no explanation! Does explanation even exist in science? Remove mathematics – something completely unexplained by science – and what remains of science? Nothing at all! The task of ontological mathematics is to refute scientific materialism and to answer everything in terms of sinusoidal monadic minds. This turns out to be simple. Once “matter” is defined in terms of sinusoidal waves, all arguments concerning matter become arguments about sinusoidal waves, which inherently belong to monadic minds!
The Soul Mystery It’s amazing how many people refer to the soul and believe utterly in its existence without having the vaguest idea of what it is, and without showing even the
barest curiosity about the subject. The ontology of the soul is something that never troubles them. Its epistemological status never crosses their mind. They don’t want to know what it is; they simply want to believe that it exists. “Soul” is used as a label for something spooky, mysterious and glorious which allows us to ignore the central claim of scientific materialism that we are just temporal, ephemeral collections of lifeless, mindless atoms that, for a period, are organized into a living, thinking entity, but which will inevitably die and decompose into the dust from which they came. For science, life is meaningless, purposeless and pointless. For those that don’t accept this nihilism, the soul is the meaningful, purposeful entity that is the whole point of our existence. The soul is what the commonplace human adds to science to “complete the picture”. Of course, the ordinary person who believes in the soul has no idea what it’s made of, why it exists, how it operates, what laws apply to it, how it interacts with the scientific world, and how it’s in any way compatible with scientific materialism given that science absolutely denies the existence of the soul. None of that is of any interest to the typical believers in the soul. If they were interested, everyone on earth would be able to cite chapter and verse on exactly what the soul is and how it functions. As it is, almost no one can say anything about the soul. But it hasn’t always been like that. Once upon a time, many educated people had a functional understanding of the soul. These people were Catholic priests and monks. Given how central the soul ought to be any religion, it’s incumbent on any religion to explain the soul. The only religion that has ever seriously addressed the soul is Roman Catholicism. Only Catholicism provided an account of the soul that any philosopher could contemplate, and that’s because Catholicism based its model of the soul on ancient Greek philosophy, especially that of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus (the Neoplatonist). The Catholic philosophical tradition known as Scholasticism was wiped out by modern philosophy and science, yet the last person to have a full understanding of it was Leibniz (although not a Catholic, Leibniz had an understanding of Catholicism better than that of any Catholic), and its ideas are present throughout his monadic philosophy, by which he reduced the whole of reality to minds and their operations. To understand Leibniz, you need to understand two of the greatest Scholastic thinkers, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. ✽✽✽
If you are serious about the soul, you had better have a serious knowledge and understanding of it, a rigorous definition and an account of how it fits in with science. Otherwise you are engaging in wishful thinking and wish fulfilment, and you are spouting self-serving, irrational and mystical nonsense, just to make you feel good about yourself and to try to ward off your fear of death. You will never become enlightened with an attitude like that, of denial and evasion.
Pagan Catholicism Roy Jackson wrote, “Plato, along with his one-time student Aristotle, had a massive impact on Christian theology. For Plato, this is perhaps most prevalent in his dualism; the existence of two independent worlds – the realm of the Forms and the world of the senses – and the existence of two independent parts of the human Pagan Catholicism Roy Jackson wrote, “Plato, along with his one-time student Aristotle, had a massive impact on Christian theology. For Plato, this is perhaps most prevalent in his dualism; the existence of two independent worlds – the realm of the Forms and the world of the senses – and the existence of two independent parts of the human being – the immaterial soul and the physical body.” The theology of Roman Catholicism is effectively a debate between Platonists, Aristotelians and Neoplatonists viewed through the prism of Jewish Messianism. If you remove the Jewish aspect – a Middle Eastern pseudomorphosis – you are left with an exploration of ancient Greek pagan philosophy. There is nothing about Catholicism that would not be improved if it simply got rid of the Jewish rabbi Yehoshua ben Yosef (aka Jesus Christ) and became pure pagan theological philosophy. Then Catholicism could become the Universal Church, the oneworld religion it was always supposed to be. Roy Jackson wrote, “Neither the Old nor New Testament contain a belief in such a [Platonist] dualism; a separation between the material body and an immaterial soul. The Creeds explicitly state a belief in the resurrection of the body (although St. Paul considers this a ‘spiritual body’). In the early centuries of the Church, Christian theology employed the ideas of Plato into its doctrine, and only then did the idea of an immaterial soul come about.”
It’s essential to understand that the Bible, in and of itself, reflects a materialist theology. With this form of materialism, the matter of a person’s body can be reconstituted after death by the power of God, and the “dead” person can then be alive once more and able to enjoy a glorious second and more permanent life. The Bible makes no attempt to explain the actual process of resurrection, its ontology, epistemology, metaphysics and physics. Resurrection is presented as a divine miracle, something to be taken on faith. The Greek philosophers were nothing like the writers of the Bible. They were nothing like prophets. They wanted to know, to understand, to explain. They had no interest in inexplicable religious miracles. Such things could play no part in philosophy. Protestantism is interesting only insofar as it came along and realized - correctly - that Catholicism is full of pagan philosophy of a very high intellectual order. Martin Luther, the first Protestant, promptly jettisoned all of it. All that mattered to Luther was the Bible itself. Anything not in the Bible – not in the “inerrant Word of God” – was false, non-Biblical, and was of the Antichrist and the Devil. Once that posture is adopted, you arrive exactly at Luther’s position – all that counts is your personal faith in the Bible (you are “justified” by your faith alone) and reason is “the Devil’s whore”, i.e. all intellectualism, including all pagan Greek philosophy, is Satanic and to be rejected. Protestantism is total anti-intellectualism and irrationalism. You have to take everything on faith, and never ask any questions. Philosophy, science and mathematics must never be applied to the Bible. That would constitute a diabolical undertaking, guaranteed to undermine faith. Raymond J. Devettere wrote, “[Pagan mystery religion suggested that we were something more than our material bodies.] The mystery religions usually called this ‘something more’ a ‘soul,’ and some of them included doctrines about the soul’s leaving the body at death and then coming back into another body [Reincarnation]. The doctrine of the soul gained influence in the second half of the sixth century with the emergence of a scholarly and religious group in southern Italy – the Greek-speaking Pythagoreans.”
The Pythagoreans were the first to challenge materialism. All previous thinking had more or less viewed the world in material terms, albeit with some mysterious spiritual component present in material reality, but usually understood to be an extremely rarefied and pure kind of matter, rather than something not material at all. The Pythagoreans, the geniuses of the ancient world, were the first to contemplate another order of existence – the immaterial order. They were the first to see that mathematics was the key to immaterialism, and that the immaterial order contained the explanation of the material order, an idea seized upon by Plato with his distinction between the intelligible (immaterial, rational) order and the sensible (material, empirical) order. Whereas ancient religion had effectively been a modified materialism – matter with some type of mental property built into it via highly refined matter – the Pythagoreans, who combined religion with philosophy and mathematics, posited a dualism of matter and non-matter (mind, spirit, soul … however you want to express it). This created a radically different worldview, a revolutionary new way of understanding reality. The Pythagorean conception of reality was adopted by Socrates and Plato. However, where the Pythagoreans saw mathematics as the best way to understand reality (both immaterial and material), Socrates and Plato took a metaphysical approach. Raymond J. Devettere wrote, “According to the theory [of Socrates and Plato], each of us is a composite of body and soul. The body is material and biological, but the soul is neither material nor biological. Because the soul is immaterial, it cannot be seen, or touched, or observed in any way. Nor does it have a beginning or an end – it is eternal.” This is a key point. The mind or soul is an eternal and necessary entity. It cannot die. The body, by contrast, is temporal and contingent. It must die. All of the mysteries of existence concern this relationship between the imperishable eternal and necessary order and the perishable temporal and contingent order. Science, which is pure materialism, abolishes the eternal and necessary a priori order. It is not part of its paradigm. It is not material, it is not empirical, it is not observable. No experiments can be performed on it. It belongs to the rational, logical, mathematical order. All you can do is think about it. It concerns mind in and of itself, but science rejects mind in and of itself.
Raymond J. Devettere wrote, “The soul animates the body – keeps it alive and provides for its growth and movement – and enables the human being to know things and make choices.” According to science, dead matter, if organized properly, can come to life for a while (for a lifetime), before returning to death. Science has never once explained how this miracle occurs. The use of the word “emergent” – deployed by scientists when they say that life and mind are “emergent properties of matter” – isn’t an explanation. It’s just a description. Never forget what Nietzsche said, “We say it is ‘explanation’ but it is only in ‘description’ that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better, we explain just as little as our predecessors.” According to the Pythagoreans, eternal living entities (souls) link to matter and animate it, thus creating a living body. When the link breaks down, the body ceases to be animated and returns to its lifeless state (it disintegrates into dust). The eternal entities never perish, only the temporal bodies do. Life is a property of eternal things, not of their constructs (temporal things). Bodies are not true entities. They are constructs. They are born and they die. Eternal things are never born, hence never die. That’s why they are life itself. Life – true life – is that which is imperishable. True life constitutes the ontological basis of the law of conservation of energy. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Energy is eternal and necessary, but can be expressed in temporal and contingent terms. All temporal and contingent things break up. They are incapable of retaining their energy indefinitely. They are subject to entropy. They cannot constitute a perpetual motion machine. All eternal things – which are living monadic minds – are by contrast perpetual motion thinking organisms. Their mental energy can never run out. That’s because it reflects the flawless operations of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). A point traveling round the circumference of a circle and generating sinusoidal basis waves in doing so, can never stop, never stray, never stutter, never encounter space, time, friction, entropy. It can never degrade. It belongs to the perfect mathematical order of reason, not to the scientific order of matter. Materialism is the doctrine that only temporal and contingent things exist. Idealism, which embraces metaphysics, religion, spirituality and mathematics, is the doctrine that
the eternal and necessary order is true existence, and this produces the temporal and contingent order. The eternal and necessary order is inherently mental and alive. The constructed order is inherently material and dead (actually, to be more exact, it’s the output of living mind, but is not itself alive, just as a dream is an output of a dreamer, but has no existence, no life, of its own). No materialist has ever grasped that we actually inhabit an eternal Hive Mind, comprised of individual monadic minds (the inherent nodes, or cells, of the Hive). The Hive Mind is mathematical, not some absurd mystical entity (non-duality, bare awareness, cosmic consciousness, or whatever). The problem for the materialist is to explain how dead things without mind produce living, thinking beings. Science hasn’t proposed even one solution to this problem. It’s a problem that science inherently cannot address. There is no equation or law of science that makes any reference to life or mind, so how can any scientific process possibly arrive at life or mind? It could only ever be by a miracle. Science uses silly, non-explanatory terms such as “emergentism”, “epiphenomenon” and “illusion” to label this miracle. The only interesting thing about these terms is how absurd they are, and why scientists use them at all since they are unscientific, nonquantitative, non-empirical terms that do not and cannot explain anything at all. No one observes “emergence”, just as no one observes “randomness”. These are nonempirical interpretations of unseen and unseeable processes. These interpretations are accepted by the science community not because they are consistent with science but because they are the least costly modification to science’s ideological paradigm. Think about it. Scientific materialism cannot underpin science with God, Consciousness, Spirit, Mind, Metaphysics or Mathematics – since these all repudiate science. So, to explain away things it cannot explain at all, it underpins science with randomness, probabilism,
chance,
accident,
indeterminacy,
indeterminism,
uncertainty,
emergentism, acausation, the Multiverse, and so on. None of these things can be observed, hence they are all incompatible with science, but they are the least expensive way of supplementing dogmatic materialism, which is why they have been adopted by science, even though they are absolutely unscientific. Not once will any scientist ever
observe a random event, or an uncertain event. What they will observe is an event, and then they will apply an interpretation (actually a misinterpretation) that will avoid any reference to “hidden variables”, mathematical unobservables, invisible mental processes, and so on … anything that would entail a deeper level of reality than that of science and matter. Actually, randomness (= chaos) implies a deeper level of reality than that of science and matter. After all, how can materialism explain a random order of existence, from which matter supposedly “emerges” one fine day? If you think explaining how materialism can account for mind is difficult, try explaining how materialism accounts for randomness (from which matter allegedly erupts at the Big Bang via some miraculous process, without any reason). In fact, the combination of materialism and randomness constitutes a blatant Cartesian dualism. It is impossible for randomness (chaos) and matter (order) to coexist and interact, and for one to explain the other. It is a category error to put matter and randomness together (unless, like the ancient Greeks, you actually equate chaos – formlessness, absence of order – to matter). Sadly, science has literally zero interest in its own coherence and logic. It is after all predicated on observation, not on reason, logic and coherence. Fundamentally, no scientific explanations of anything make any sense. What science gets right is its use of mathematics. It’s mathematics, not science, that offers explanations of the world, and that’s because reality is mathematical. To say that life “emerges” from the lifeless, or that mind is an “epiphenomenon” of the mindless, or that free will is an “illusion”, is simply to apply labels to science’s ignorance, not to explain anything. Science does not have the wherewithal to explain any of these things. It’s logically impossible. The problem for the idealist is totally different from that of a materialist. The idealist has to explain how eternal and necessary mind produces temporal and contingent matter. The Big Bang perfectly matches the idealist conception of reality. The Big Bang is exactly when the eternal and necessary Universal Mind produces the temporal and contingent material universe. The material universe is born, so will inevitably die. The material universe is born from the Cosmic Egg – the mental Singularity – and will inevitably return to it at death.
Raymond J. Devettere wrote, “The immaterial soul enables us to know the things that are not of this material world, things such as numbers and other mathematical notions, as well as universal and unchanging ideas such as justice, courage, and the like.” This is a key point. Numbers, concepts, language, Forms, reason and logic, laws, principles, and so on, are not part of the empirical, material order of the temporal, contingent and observable. They belong to the rational, mental order of the eternal, necessary and unobservable. The material body enables us to “know” the things that are of the material world. This is empirical “knowledge” (truths of fact). True knowledge can be attained only by the immaterial mind. This is rational knowledge (comprising truths of reason). Science deals with truths of fact and mathematics with truths of reason. Science deals with the temporal and contingent order, which can’t explain itself because it has a beginning in time, and that means there must be something outside time to cause it. Mathematics, by contrast, deals with the eternal and necessary order, which can explain itself since it is uncreated and uncaused, hence its sufficient reason is encoded directly, analytically into it. The ultimate reason for things, the sufficient reason for existence, is that existence analytically equals “nothing”. Nothing requires nothing and nothing can prevent nothing, so nothing’s existence is inevitable, compulsory. It’s not “nothing at all” that exists – that would be absurd. (“Nothing at all” is non-existence.) The “nothing” that exists is the nothing that is something with a net result of nothing. This is a very precise entity. It’s the sinusoidal wave. Raymond J. Devettere wrote, “The immaterial soul allows us to escape some of the determinism of the material world in which we are enmeshed to make choices and, thereby, to have some control over our lives.” Free will is possible only if there is an order outside the temporal and contingent order of science which is not caught up in scientific causal chains. Free will relies on independence from those chains. Free will is impossible in a strictly immanent order, such as that posited by science. Free will requires entities that stand in a transcendent relationship to the immanent world, hence are not caught up in immanent causality.
Raymond J. Devettere wrote, “In this Socratic-Platonic conceptual model, the soul had no beginning; it always was. Its existence is eternal. Each of us begins when the preexisting soul enters the human body and we die when the soul departs from the body.” This has always been a key consideration. Immaterial souls do not begin and do not end. Material bodies, by contrast, begin and end. Immaterial souls aren’t part of material bodies and aren’t located in material bodies. They link to them. They are like remote pilots controlling physical drones far away. A pilot and a drone are, however, two entities in an immanent world, separated by an immanent distance. They belong to the same local order. A soul and its body, by contrast, have the relationship of a transcendent entity to an immanent entity. They are separated non-locally, which is to say they are “entangled”. Just as the average human mind cannot grasp quantum mechanics, non-locality, and entanglement, the average mind cannot grasp how transcendence relates to immanence. Science, which is based on sensory picture thinking, cannot conceive of transcendent, non-local relationships. They stand outside its paradigm. They are conceptual, not perceptual. They are mathematical, not scientific. They are rational, not empirical. Raymond J. Devettere wrote, “Since the soul animates the body, the self-movement of the body indicates that the soul is present, and the lack of movement indicates it has escaped. In general terms, then, the criterion of human life was the spontaneous movement of a human body, and the criterion of death was the permanent cessation of that spontaneous movement.” Human life does not belong to the human body. It belongs to the soul linked to it. Death is what results from the breakdown of the link between soul and body, just as a drone would “die” if its remote pilot’s link to it broke down through technical malfunction, wear and tear, accident, rust, or whatever. Raymond J. Devettere wrote, “So powerful was this Socratic-Platonic model of the material body-immaterial soul that many of the early Christian thinkers adopted it. The Christians did make one important change – they rejected the eternal preexistence of the soul and said, instead, that God created a human soul for each of us at some point in our fetal development. However, the Christians retained the same material bodyimmaterial soul duality. They explained the beginning of life as the infusion of an immaterial rational soul into the human body, and the end of that life as the departure of the soul from the body.”
When it comes to souls, three types are possible: Mortal souls are strictly immanent. Immortal souls are apparently capable of enjoying both immanent and transcendent existence. Eternal souls are strictly transcendent.
Bodies versus Souls Bodies and souls are the main combatants in the war between empiricism and rationalism. Bodies and souls deal with knowledge in entirely different ways. Bodies gain knowledge via sensation. The eyes experience visual sensation, the ears auditory sensation, the tongue taste sensation, the nose olfactory sensation, the skin touch sensation, the emotions feeling sensations, intuition mystical sensations. These are all experiential. This type of knowledge relies on temporal, contingent bodies. They are essential to this type of knowledge. This is temporal and contingent knowledge, concerned with sensory truths of fact. The immaterial soul is the part that thinks, that reasons. It deals with a priori, rational, logical, mathematical, analytic knowledge. It does not have to observe or experience the world. The immaterial soul deals with intellectual knowledge, while the body deals with sensible experience. Intellectual knowledge relies on eternal souls. They are essential to this type of knowledge. This is eternal and necessary knowledge, concerned with truths of reason. “Body” people (materialists) are those who follow the empiricist route to knowledge. “Soul” people (idealists) are rationalists. These are radically different types. Mathematics is the archetypal soul subject. Pythagoras was the first to grasp this. Science is where the two approaches (body and soul) clash. Science is predicated on observation (a body activity; you need a body to carry out observations). But science is useless without mathematics (a soul activity; you only need a mind to do mathematics; bodies are redundant). Science has been highly successful by merging body empiricism with soul rationalism. However, it is an incoherent subject due to its inherent empiricist-rationalist contradiction, and it is totally unable to explain the fundamental nature of existence, the transcendent source of the temporal, contingent universe (the spacetime universe of matter, of bodies and objects), mind, consciousness, the unconscious, free will, teleology, meaning, and the nature of life. The only subject that can address all of these
is the quintessential soul subject – ontological mathematics. Ontological mathematics is the science of existence, of ultimate reality. Only the soul can understand ultimate reality – because the soul is ultimate reality, the fundamental functional unit of existence. The likes of Pythagoras and Plato understood this. Science does not understand it. Science rejects the soul and all the knowledge of the soul. Science begins and ends with the body, with the body’s sense organs and the observations they conduct. Science relies on the limited, fallible, unreliable and delusional human senses, which is exactly why it is doomed. One of the best ways to comprehend why the senses are so poor for telling us about reality is via Hegel’s notion of “sense-certainty. This is concerned with an immediate, unreflective mode of experience, which is trusted implicitly and absolutely. The world is there, just as it is. You open your eyes, and see the world. You have no doubt you are seeing the world. That’s sense-certainty. It is, you believe, an entirely unmediated experience, hence accurate and authentic. Philosopher Peter Singer wrote, “Sense-certainty makes no attempt to order or classify the raw information obtained by the senses. Thus when this form of consciousness has in front of it what we would describe as a ripe tomato, it cannot describe its experience as a tomato, for that would be to classify what it sees. It cannot even describe the experience as one of seeing something round and red, for these terms too presuppose some form of classification. Sense-certainty is aware only of what is now present to it; as Hegel puts it, it is the certainty of the ‘this’, or the ‘here’ and ‘now’. ... Sense-certainty seems to have a strong claim to being genuine knowledge, for it is directly aware of ‘this’, without imposing on it the distorting filters of a conceptual space, time, or any other categories. Sense-certainty is simple awareness of the object exactly as it is. Yet, as Hegel shows, the claim that sense-certainty is knowledge does not stand up to further investigation. As soon as sense-certainty attempts to utter its knowledge, it becomes incoherent. What is the ‘this’?” This is the whole problem. Observing something doesn’t tell you what it is. It doesn’t explain it. The immediate experience of observation does not constitute knowledge. To be converted into knowledge, mediation is required for all experiences, and that is provided by Forms, by concepts, by language, by the intelligible order of reason and logic, by mathematics.
The Life Principle The soul is the life principle. Life is at core an intellectual principle, defined by the Principle of Sufficient Reason, its source. That’s why the soul is the reasoning, thinking, analytic part of us. Plato argued for the existence of an immaterial, intelligible reality separate from the physical, sensible world. In Aristotle’s system, only God (pure form) was separate from the physical world. Plato insisted on a radical distinction between the immaterial soul and the physical body. The soul belonged to the intelligible, transcendent realm. Aristotle argued for a close connection, a natural union of the body and soul. The soul belonged to the immanent realm. God alone was transcendent and immaterial. In Plato’s system, the immortal soul seeks to escape the physical realm. It is destined to make its ultimate home, where it is ultimately fulfilled, in the eternal, transcendent realm, the intelligible realm. Aristotle was much more concerned with the physical, immanent world. The soul was fully involved with that. God alone stood outside the immanent domain. Roman Catholicism looked to Plato and Aristotle for its theology, thus rendering Catholicism, intellectually, a version of Greek philosophy, albeit suffering from a pseudomorphism of Jewish Messianism. Thomas
Aquinas
brought
about
a
synthesis
of
Christianity
and
Aristotelian philosophy. Bonaventure, inspired by Saint Augustine, was involved with a synthesis of Christianity and Platonist and Neoplatonist philosophy (while also accepting several Aristotelian positions). While Saint Augustine interpreted Christianity using Plato’s dualistic understanding of reality (the immaterial soul was separate from the body), Aquinas adopted Aristotle’s hylomorphic metaphysical views, which made the soul integral to the body rather than detachable from it. Bonaventure had a position somewhat in between Plato and Aristotle, whereby he accepted a hylomorphic soul, but one that was much more detachable from the corporeal world.
In Aristotle’s hylomorphic metaphysical system, there are two basic categories of things: A hylomorphic substance is a composite of matter and form. Nature comprises hylomorphic substances. For Plato, form existed independently from matter, but could be impressed on matter to create formed matter. For Aristotle, form and matter always existed together, except in the case of God, who was pure form, completely free of matter, and also hypothetical prime matter, which was pure matter, completely free of form. Plato’s system, making form separate from matter, theologically supported reincarnation,
as
both
Pythagoras
and
Plato
taught.
Aristotle’s
system,
indissolubly linking form and matter, could be made to theologically support resurrection (although Aristotle himself would never have accepted such an idea). Therefore, Catholic theology migrated towards Aristotelian hylomorphism to define the relation of the soul to the body. For Plato, Forms constituted the highest order of reality and these existed independently of the physical, sensible world. They were, so to speak, supernatural. For Aristotle, forms were embedded in physical objects, hence existed completely within the natural order (with the exception of God – pure Form – which existed outside the material universe). For Aristotle, everything in nature has both a material element and a formal element. Although we can separate these two elements in thought, they cannot be separated in reality. In the case of the human person, the soul is the form of the body and makes sense only in relation to the body. Hylomorphism preserves the unity of the human being: it ties the soul to the body. Plato’s dualistic self – involving a physical self and a nonphysical soul – separates the soul from the body. There is no inherent unity. The soul is the true unity, not the body. According to Platonist dualism, the body has life only while the living soul animates it. If the body dies, the soul does not. The soul is incapable of dying. It is made of imperishable things (perfect sinusoidal waves in ontological mathematics, conveying the law of conservation of energy).
According to hylomorphism, all parts of the body have life and existence if and only if they are actualized by the soul. For Aristotle, the body and soul go together. The death of one necessitates the death of the other. Christianity then had to modify this teaching to allow for life after death, ultimately via bodily resurrection. In Thomas Aquinas’s theology, when the human body dies, the soul that animates it does not die but becomes incomplete. It will be complete again only when resurrection has restored its body. Upon bodily death, the soul – the body’s substantial form (the form which makes it an intelligible, essential substance) – survives apart from the body. The separated soul operates somewhat as the angels do (for Aquinas, angels exist entirely separately from matter), but this mode of operation is unnatural to human souls, which require union with their body to be complete. So, the soul of a human exists in an unnatural state while disembodied, and can return to its proper, natural state only when its body is restored to it via resurrection. Hylomorphism is a middle position between materialism (immaterial souls do not exist) and dualism (material bodies and separate immaterial souls both exist). It binds souls and bodies into a single entity. Aquinas supported a religious version of hylomorphism (such as to allow an afterlife and bodily resurrection), while Aristotle’s original hylomorphism was nonreligious (it did not support life after death; once the body was gone, there was nothing for the soul to animate, and thus it was gone too).
Catholic Platonism Saint Augustine insisted that Platonism and Christianity were natural partners. He said, “If [the Platonists] could have had this life over again with us … they would have become Christians, with the change of a few words and statements.” Since the Platonists were just a version of Pythagoreans, this would apply to the Pythagoreans too. However, by the same token, it could be said that Catholics, given a few minor modifications, could easily be converted into Platonists and Pythagoreans. In fact, you only need to eliminate Hebrew Messianism from Catholicism. You just ditch the Bible
and replace it with Plato’s Republic! Wouldn’t that be something?! The Catholics would then be amongst the smartest people on earth. Platonists would certainly have understood Catholic Christianity, but they would have dismissed Protestant Christianity instantly. Augustine adopted the basic Platonist ontology of a bifurcated universe. He wrote, “Plato held that there are two realms, an intelligible realm where truth itself dwells, and this sensible world which we perceive by sight and touch.” This became his own Christian position. Plato’s ultimate reality, the eternal realm of the Forms, was reframed by Augustine as the transcendent Christian God in heaven. Where Plato had imagined eternal souls achieving union with ultimate reality by way of intellectual enlightenment (they would gaze on the Forms and know all things), Augustine envisaged immortal souls striving to achieve spiritual union with God through both faith and reason. Augustinian Christianity is in many ways Plato’s transcendent intellectual system turned into a person (the Christian God). Plato had to invoke a Demiurge, a godlike being, to create the physical world by using its knowledge of the Forms to apply these design templates and archetypes to matter. For Augustine, the Demiurge became the Christian God, and the eternal Forms were relocated to God’s mind. God created the physical world out of nothing, hence created matter out of nothing. Augustine, reflecting on the relationship between soul and body, wrote, “…since there is almost universal consensus … that we are composites of soul and body, what [then] is the man himself? Is he both of the things I [just] mentioned, or the body alone, or the soul alone? For although soul and body are two things, and neither would be called a ‘man’ if the other did not exist (for neither would the body be a man if the soul did not exist, nor in turn would the soul be a man if a body were not animated by it), nevertheless it can happen that one of these should be regarded as the ‘man’ and called [such]. Therefore, what do we call the ‘man’? [Is he] soul and body, like a ‘team’ [of horses] or a centaur? [Is he] the body alone, which is being used by a soul that rules it, like a ‘lantern’, [which is] not the flame and the container together but only the container, although we call it [a lantern] because of the flame? [Or] do we call nothing
but the soul the ‘man’, but on account of the body it rules, just as we call a ‘rider’ not the horse and the man together but only the man, yet [only] insofar as he is suited to governing the horse? … For whether both, or only the soul, takes the name of ‘man’, the best thing for the man is not what is best for the body. Rather what is best for the soul and body together, or for the soul alone, that is best for man.” So, the body is a vessel used by the soul, a drone used by a pilot, a kind of horse used by a rider. The body definitely isn’t the man. The man is the soul, or the soul-body combo, but never the body. Augustine said, “Man, as he appears to us, is a rational soul, making use of a mortal and earthly body.” Animals, unlike humans, have only an irrational soul, as mortal and earthly as their bodies. Scientists believe only in such animal souls.
The Giants Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure were the two great thinkers who towered over Scholastic philosophy in the middle of the thirteenth century. Bonaventure promoted a largely Augustinian worldview, while Aquinas promoted a version of Aristotelianism. Regarding the body-soul relationship, Aquinas and Bonaventure both adopted Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of matter and form, but in contrasting ways. Aquinas limited matter to corporeal things, Bonaventure did not. For Bonaventure, angels had material bodies, albeit bodies made of spiritual matter rather than corporeal matter. Bonaventure limited pure form to God, Aquinas did not. For Aquinas, angels were immaterial forms. They did not inherently possess material bodies, although they had the power to conjure material bodies in order to physically interact with humans. For Bonaventure, one and the same kind of matter is the substratum of spiritual and corporeal beings alike. Materia prima (prime matter) is not a mere indeter-minatum quid (what is indeterminate), but contains the rationes seminales (seminal reasons). Wikipedia says, “Rationes seminales (Latin, from the Greek logoi spermatikoi), translated variously as germinal or causal principles, primordial reasons, original factors, seminal reasons or virtues, or seedlike principles, is a theological theory on the origin of species. It is the doctrine that God created the world in seed form, with certain potentialities, which
then developed or unfolded accordingly over time; what appears to be change is simply the realization of the preexisting potentialities.” In ontological mathematics, the rationes seminales are the basis sinusoidal waves, the seeds of everything, in which the whole of phenomenal reality is contained in potentiality. According to science’s doctrine of emergentism, properties can emerge that have no precedent in their components, so life can emerge from lifeless atoms, mind can emerge from mindless atoms, consciousness can emerge from atoms that do not have consciousness, and free will (or the illusion of free will) can emerge from atoms that are wholly unfree. The theory of rationes seminales likens reality to the growth of a tree. You plant a seed, which looks nothing like a tree, but which contains the potentiality of treeness, and then you allow it to grow, and as it grows it actualizes more and more of its potential, finally becoming an actual tree. The tree did not “emerge” from atoms that had no treeness. The tree grew from tree seeds, which are potential trees from the get-go, simply waiting to be actualized over the course of time. Nothing “emerges”. Emergentism is the opposite of the Aristotelian concept of entelechy (from Greek en“within” + telos “end” – the entity contains its end, its purpose, its objective, within it, encoded in it), the process which realizes or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential. Remember, science is at all times concerned with denying teleology, so rather than say that things actualize their potentiality (meaning that whatever manifests itself was always originally implicit in the seed and just waiting to be expressed), scientists say that things emerge from their constituents even though they have no precedent in their constituents. In other words, anything can come from matter. Matter has no life, but produces life. Matter has no mind, but produces mind. Matter has no subjectivity, but produces subjectivity. Matter has no qualia, but produces qualia. Matter has no consciousness but produces consciousness. Matter has no free will but produces free will (or what passes as free will). Scientists ridicule Aristotle, while producing the most ridiculous theories of all, such as emergentism and randomism.
In ontological mathematics, sinusoidal waves are the universal seeds from which all things are made. They contain absolutely everything in potentiality, in their mathematical properties. Absolutely nothing can “emerge” that isn’t reducible to sinusoids and their properties, both individually and collectively. Emergentism is an absurd theory that you can take anything – mathematics, or science, for example – and get non-mathematics or non-science from them. These can just “emerge”. Emergentism formally contradicts science’s own doctrine of physicalist causal closure, which asserts that all physical states have pure physical causes, that physical effects have only physical causes. Emergentism says that physical causes can produce effects that have absolutely no precedent in physicality, so lifeless matter can cause life, mindless matter can produce mind, and so on. Emergentism thus allows materialism to break out of materialism, to breach materialist causal closure, which is exactly why some New Agers, fans of the likes of New Age guru Ken Wilber, have seized on emergentism. With emergentism, you can call yourself a materialist and say you are pro-science, while providing yourself with a means to invoke magic and miracles that have no conceivable logical basis in lifeless, mindless matter. Aristotle’s worldview of entelechy is in fact correct and forms a causally closed system (no feature can come from something if it is not already implicit in the something), while emergentism is not causally closed (anything can come from anything … reality is therefore wholly unpredictable and absolutely nothing can be stated about where the universe is going because, at any time, an emergent phenomenon may appear that changes everything, such as the appearance of life from the lifeless, or mind from the mindless, or X from non-X). Which system is compatible with reason and logic, and which isn’t? Emergentism, increasingly popular amongst scientists (just as crazy Multiverse theory is), spells the end for science as any kind of rational and logical subject. It turns it into a system predicated on random miracles. Science simply replaces “God”, who performs miracles by design, with randomness, which performs miracles without design. That’s science for you. It will do anything to get rid of meaningful design and substitute it with meaningless randomness.
Wikipedia says, “When God created the world he planted rationes seminales, from which all life sprung. It is intended to reconcile the belief that God created all things, with the evident fact that new things are constantly developing.” Rationes seminales are thus an anticipation of the theory of evolution, and a step away from simplistic Creationism. “God” does not create specific creatures but, rather, plants universal seeds that can grow in all sorts of diverse, particular ways. Think of DNA, the life code. Life on earth – of the kind that led to human beings – began with the first appearance of DNA in a cell. But look at all the different life forms that came from the original DNA. It has had countless branches. DNA is very much in the mold of rationes seminales. In ontological mathematics, the rationes seminales are the sinusoidal basis waves, the basis code for everything, including DNA, and all matter. Wikipedia says, “The roots of this idea [of rationes seminales] can be found within the Greek philosophy of the Stoics and Neoplatonism. The idea was incorporated into Christian thought through the writings of authors such as Justin the Martyr, Athenagoras of Athens, Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon. Contemporary theistic evolutionists look to this doctrine for inspiration on the consistency of Judeo-Christian creation and the modern biological theory of evolution.” Ontological
mathematics
replaces
Judeo-Christian
“theistic
evolution”,
with panentheistic mathematical evolution, where there is no Creator. Instead, the rationes seminales are eternal and necessary, and they are the origin of all creation. They are maximally simple, general, stable, rational, logical and universal. They are sinusoids, complete sets of which constitute monadic minds. Sinusoids are basis thoughts, hence are the perfect rationes seminales. How could the rationes seminales be anything other than the expressions of the PSR? How could they be anything other than thoughts? For Bonaventure, rationes seminales are embedded in prime matter and direct prime matter towards the acquisition of those many forms which prime matter in due course assumes.
Science versus Hylomorphism
Robert Pasnau wrote, “Our default [scientific] theory of bodies today is taken from the seventeenth century, though it springs largely out of ancient atomism: we take material substances to be constituted by their integral parts, and to be nothing more than the sum of those parts. On this picture, the bodies we are ordinarily acquainted with are just a collection of smaller bodies, perhaps with the further proviso that the whole be assembled in a certain way. The rightness of this picture can seem so self-evident as to require no defense.” The materialist worldview is one of some unspecified base level of matter (it might be “strings”, or something more basic, or something completely different from strings) being used to build up all the rest of the material world. There is matter alone in this system. However, matter in and of itself, cannot explain anything. Matter is a sensible concept, not an intelligible concept. So, how is intelligibility introduced into science? Science uses mathematics, a subject undefined by science, and also incompatible with the scientific method, which it formally contradicts. Mathematics is usually regarded as an unreal, manmade abstraction. Science makes no attempt to explain how a supposedly unreal subject can have any relevance to science, a supposedly real subject. Science cannot explain the mystery of mathematics, never mind the mystery of existence (which it assumes to be anything other than mathematics). No scientist cares about science’s failure to come to terms with mathematics and the intelligibility it supplies. Mathematics is wholly incommensurate with science and is practically its opposite. Mathematics is an analytic, a priori, coherent, eternal and necessary, deductive subject. It’s about reason and logic. It does not require a single observation or experience, hence has nothing to do with empirical science and its observational method. It’s the quintessence of rationalism, not empiricism. Science – a resolutely anti-intellectual subject committed to practical success – has no interest in explaining its own fundamental, foundational contradictions. It’s not interested in coherence. All it cares about is achieving pragmatic results and developing useful heuristics. It expends no effort at all in explaining exactly what reality is and why it is.
Science is a “how” subject, not a “why” subject. It’s a correspondence subject, not a coherence subject. It describes processes, it models processes, it does not offer ultimate explanations. It goes nowhere near ultimate explanations. Ultimate explanations are never observable. They are never empirical. They are never material. If humans could observe the answer to existence, the human race would have answered the conundrum of existence long, long ago. If you can’t observe the answer to existence, why would you imagine that a procedure based on observation is going to reveal the answer to existence? It doesn’t make any sense. Pasnau wrote, “To medieval philosophers working in the Aristotelian tradition, however, this [scientific] analysis would seem so incomplete as to be laughable. On their model, although bodies are composed of other bodies, this sort of analysis never gets to the fundamental constituents of the material world, however far down it goes, because it frames the analysis in the wrong way.” Aristotle was a philosopher, not a scientist. A philosopher emphasizes the intelligible, not the sensible. Philosophers are more interested in why than how. Philosophers are conceptual thinkers. They rarely engage in perception. (Ironically, Aristotle was one of the most perceptual, empirical philosophers.) Philosophy ought to be much more closely aligned with its fellow conceptual subject, mathematics. This was very much the case with geniuses such as Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz and Gödel. Modern philosophy, unfortunately, is almost wholly subservient to scientism and never seriously challenges the central claims of empiricism and materialism (“naturalism”). This has rendered modern philosophy unfit for purpose and a total waste of time. An inherently conceptual subject, philosophy has incoherently tied itself to a subject based on perception. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze said, “Philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts.” Why then has philosophy made itself the slave of science, the quintessential perceptual subject? What’s the difference between philosophy, science and mathematics? Philosophy is a subject with no method. It is the exploration of manmade concepts. Science is a subject with an empirical method of observation. All concepts science produces have to link to the observed, phenomenal order. Mathematics, the language of existence, is the subject that concerns the inherent concepts of reality itself. The method of mathematics is to
restrict all concepts to those of the purest reason and logic, concerned with numbers and number patterns (functions). Philosophy is human speculation, science is human speculation tied to the world that is revealed to the limited, unreliable, fallible human senses, and mathematics is the exploration of how reality is in itself, how it thinks in itself and of itself. Modern philosophy needs to choose between science and mathematics. Thus far, it has chosen science. It needs to reverse this choice and get behind ontological mathematics instead. Robert Pasnau wrote, “For an Aristotelian, the fundamental constituents of physical bodies are not integral parts, but the metaphysical parts of form and matter.” It can’t be stressed enough how different the Aristotelian system is from science. Where science is a sensible subject rather than an intelligible subject (anything intelligible in science is provided by supposedly unreal, abstract, manmade mathematics; science always privileges the sensible over the intelligible), Aristotle’s system is driven by the intelligible. Form is the agent of intelligibility, while matter is the agent of sensibility. Matter is how we observe the substance, but form is how we understand it. Form is the actuality of the thing, its reality, its essence. Science got rid of form and instead made everything about matter, about the sensible order. Of course, the sensible order in itself is unintelligible, by definition, so science needs to find some means of adding intelligibility. Science does so via mathematics. Mathematics, for science, replaces Platonist and Aristotelian form. In fact, this is exactly the right thing to do since ontological form is indeed defined by mathematics, the ultimate intelligible subject. The problem is that science has to regard mathematics as an unreal abstraction in order not to interfere with the supposed reality of matter. Once you accept the reality of mathematical form, you no longer require the scientific method – the defining activity of science – to address reality in itself. Where Aristotle’s hylomorphism asserted the reality of both form and matter, science asserts the reality of matter and the unreality of form (mathematics). Ontological mathematics asserts the reality of form (mathematics) and makes “matter” the information empirically carried by mathematical form (syntax). For Aristotle, hylomorphism involved two different, separate orders of existence (one of matter, and one of form). Nature, the world we experience, is where all combinations of
matter and form are found. We do not encounter prime matter (matter in itself, independent of form), and we do not encounter God (form in itself, independent of matter). For Aristotle, ultimate form is pure life and pure mind – it’s God, a living, thinking being. Prime matter is the opposite of God, namely pure non-life and non-mind. Aristotle’s system is about bringing together life, mind and intelligibility (form) on the one hand and non-life, non-mind and sensibility (matter) on the other. All living creatures have “souls”, their defining forms. Plants have nutritive souls, animals have sensitive souls (which include the nutritive soul), and humans have rational souls (which include the sensitive and nutritive souls). In other words, there is an ascending, nested hierarchy of soul functions. The basic soul concerns growth, nutrition, and reproduction, the secondary soul concerns locomotion, perception and feelings, the tertiary soul concerns intellect, thought, reasoning, the ability to exercise logic. Inanimate objects such as rocks do not have souls, but they do have basic forms. We might say that the life, mind and intellect of inanimate objects exist at such a low level, much closer to lifeless prime matter than God (ultimate life), that they are soulless, having only the most primitive, least effective forms, that barely alter the nature of dead, inert, passive matter. In science, this dead prime matter is asserted to be the basis of existence, while form is deemed some dead, unreal abstraction applied to dead matter. Although there is no life and no mind in science’s basic picture of reality, mind and life somehow miraculously “emerge” in the universe. Science is fundamentally opposed to life and mind and reduces them to bizarre, unexplained epiphenomena (secondary effects or by-products) of lifeless, mindless matter. No scientist seems remotely bothered by the fact that science has literally no clue how lifeless things can create life, or mindless things can create mind. Science asserts that they do, but it is impossible for it to give any actual explanation. Why would a reality of dead matter have any need, or any capacity, to produce its opposite (living mind)? This is a category error. In Aristotelian terms, what science is claiming is that you can take prime matter and then, by arranging it in various ways, you can generate form from it, including soul-
forms of plants, animals and humans. This would be comically silly to any Aristotelian. There is no route from prime matter to God. Ontological mathematics is a dual-aspect monism. It replaces form-matter dualism with an informational monism, involving information carriers and the information they carry. The information carrier isn’t one thing and the information it carries something else. Rather they are two aspects of the same thing. This is a highly complex idea, so let’s unpack it. Think of a train. It’s a people carrier. The carrier and the people it carries are two completely different things. In terms of ontological mathematics, the train is the syntax of the information – the form, the rational and logical aspect, the intelligible aspect – while the people are the semantics of the information – the content, the empirical aspect, the matter, the sensible aspect. In ontological mathematics, the people are not separate from the train, and cannot get off the train. They are the train, just from a different viewpoint. A human being in their intelligible aspect is a syntactic mathematical wavefunction. This is the “train”, but it’s strictly a one-human train. A human being in their sensible, semantic, empirical, phenomenal aspect is the passenger in the train, the entity you actually encounter in the phenomenal world of empirical observations. The passenger is the train, but from a different perspective. “Train” and “passenger” are two sides of one coin. The carrier of information and the information carried are two sides of one coin. By the same token, the universal wavefunction is the universal train, and all the things in the universe are the universal train’s passengers. The train and its passengers are the same things, not different things. They are two different perspectives of the same thing. One perspective is the syntactic aspect of the information carrier – this is rationalism. The other perspective is the semantic aspect, the information carried – this is empiricism. There is no Aristotelian “prime matter” (pure semantics; pure empirical, concrete, sensible stuff) and no Aristotelian God of pure form (pure syntax; pure intelligible, rational, abstract stuff). God and prime matter are two sides of one coin. All form is accompanied by matter (content). The one can never be separated from the other.
Aristotle separated form and matter, but then asserted that Nature contained nothing but hylomorphic (matter-form) substances. In Nature, form and matter are always found together. Science separated form and matter and decided that only matter was real, while form was replaced by supposedly unreal, abstract mathematics. Ontological mathematics makes form and matter part of an informational dual-aspect monism. The two always go together as two sides of one coin. Aristotle and ontological mathematics can both explain life and mind, since they are integral
to
the
system.
Science
cannot
explain
life
and
mind.
They
are
totally superfluous and extraneous in science. Science is all about dead, inert, passive matter. Life and mind have to be claimed to “emerge” from the lifeless and the mindless, a strict logical impossibility, but science always prefers its empirical ideology to logic. Logic does not feature in the scientific method. Step One of the scientific method is empirical observation. Science’s biases and prejudices are all laid bare in Step One. Right there, science privileges matter over mind, non-life over life, the sensible over the intelligible, the empirical over the rational. It can’t be stressed enough that life and mind belong to the rational and logical order, hence science is anti-life and antimind because it refuses to accept the rational and logical order as real. Ontological mathematics is based on sinusoidal waves. These are all that exist. These are both the information carriers and the information carried. They are the structure, the syntax, of reality, as well as the experience, the semantics, of reality. Sinusoids are basis thoughts, so all things are thoughts (since sinusoids are the only things that exist). Thoughts are the constituents of minds, and minds are the essence of life … there is no life without mind. Sinusoids are organized in terms of autonomous units called monads (eternal minds, aka “souls”). All living things are controlled by single monads. You, as a human being, have one monadic soul. Animals and plants also have individual controlling monadic souls, but of a less advanced kind. These are monadic minds at a lower level of evolution. Much of their potential functionality is still unactualized. What is a rock? Why is a rock not alive? The reason is simple. Rocks do not have a controlling monadic mind, the essential requirement for an entity to be alive. Rocks
belong to, and are controlled by, the collective wavefunction, meaning that all monadic minds are involved in its construction and operations. No one mind is in charge, hence no one mind can make it do anything. It just sits there passively, lifelessly, because there is nothing directing it to do anything. No one’s at home, no one’s in charge. The rock has no one seeking to do anything with it. It has no individual teleology. So it just sits there. What Aristotle referred to as “prime matter”, we would replace with “universal, collective
wavefunction”,
under
no
individual
control,
hence
with
no
individual motivation and direction. In ontological mathematics, the collective universal wavefunction is everywhere penetrated by individual wavefunctions (supplied by individual monadic minds), trying to adjust the universal wavefunction to make it do things on behalf of each individual mind. Your physical body belongs to the universal wavefunction. Like a rock, it’s just “stuff”. Without your monadic mind to animate and control your body, it would revert to what it is: lifeless dust. That’s exactly what happens at physical death. Your individual monadic wavefunction links to the universal wavefunction via the body you control, and you can make constant amendments to the universal wavefunction via what you cause your body to do (via your own free will). Why doesn’t science grasp any of this? It’s because science rejects individual monadic minds, hence it rejects free will, and inherent life and mind. What science says is that all that exists is the universal wavefunction – a pointless, meaningless, purposeless, directionless, lifeless, mindless wavefunction totally devoid of any will. This is what underlies the dead, mindless world of matter studied by scientific experiments. By some miracle – science has never offered any explanation – this universal wavefunction is able to generate the “illusion” of life and mind, and entities with the “illusion” of free will. Science has no explanation at all for any of this. Ontological mathematics, by contrast, explains the whole system in the easiest possible terms. The collective universal wavefunction isn’t something that exists by itself, as an independent entity. It is in fact a dependent entity, a construct of something deeper. The deeper level is that of individual monadic minds. Individual minds all together generate the collective
universal wavefunction and then individually adjust it via the individual avatars (bodies) they control. It’s as simple as 1 + 1 = 2. All that ontological mathematics does is convert the scientific universal wavefunction, with no source (science’s universal wavefunction is allegedly produced randomly at the Big Bang), into a universal wavefunction with a source, the source being the collection of all individual monadic minds, which are eternal and necessary (they have nothing to do with randomness). So, science has a single wavefunction with no origin and no purpose (we might call this the “prime matter” view of reality), while ontological mathematics has countless individual wavefunctions (those of monadic minds), which, between them, are able to generate a collective wavefunction, which constitutes the material universe of space, time and matter (the scientific universe), and to which every individual monadic mind can then potentially link (via a body, a physical avatar, through which the will of the individual is conveyed in the immanent world). Individual monads are living, thinking beings, and their collective wavefunction is therefore the construct of life and mind, so life and mind are inherent in this system, unlike in science, where life and mind have no explanation. It’s only because of dogmatism – the fanatical ideology of materialism and empiricism – that science refuses to accept ontological mathematics, which is a system predicated on idealism and rationalism, and which uses individual monadic minds to create the collective, universal wavefunction of the physical universe (while science claims that the physical universe, and the universal wavefunction associated with it, randomly makes itself out of non-existence). What is fascinating about humans is how they think, or rather avoid thinking. It’s selfevident that science cannot explain mind, life, the conscious, the unconscious, free will, qualia, and subjectivity. However, rather than seek to find a system that can explain all of these things, scientists simply double down and say ever more loudly that lifeless, mindless matter explains everything, even though it plainly doesn’t. Scientists can never have certain thoughts and ideas (such as life and mind rather than matter being fundamental to existence) because they rule out these thoughts and ideas from the beginning. No scientist could ever arrive at the concept of monads. Why? Because monads – inherent, ontological, living, mathematical minds – are exactly what is forbidden by the paradigm of scientism.
The scientific mind is a blinkered mind, a fixed, closed mind that cannot look outside its dogmatic paradigm for anything that might rescue it from its incoherence. Anomalies keep building up in science. Science is making no headway at all in unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics, yet it just keeps banging its head against the same wall, getting nowhere, clutching its promissory note that science will solve everything “in the future”. But it won’t. Science will be replaced by ontological mathematics and it will be ontological mathematics that solves everything. Rupert Sheldrake said, “Materialists are sustained by the faith that science will redeem their promises, turning their beliefs into facts. Meanwhile, they live on credit. The philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper described this faith as ‘promissory materialism’ because it depends on promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Despite all the achievements of science and technology, it is facing an unprecedented credit crunch.” Promissory materialism is just like the Christian Second Coming, the Rapturous event when all will be solved in the future, but this glorious future never arrives. M-theory and quantum loop gravity are going nowhere and explaining nothing. Give up already. Stop flogging that dead horse. Wake up. Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Science is now a form of insanity. It believes that if just keeps applying its same old, failed paradigm something will change and eventually all will be well. It won’t be. Science is not the answer. Ontological mathematics is.
Science in Wonderland Nobel laureate Francis Crick wrote, “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’” Science will never get anywhere near explaining reality until it acknowledges that everything said above by Crick is nonsense. You are in fact an eternal, necessary, mathematical monadic mind, an inherent living, thinking node of reality. Life and mind exist because existence is life and mind. If existence were matter, as Crick and his fellow worshipers of scientism claim, life and mind would be impossible. There is literally no means whatsoever how life can come from the lifeless and mind from the
mindless. Matter, however, can easily from living mind. Matter is just thought, just a product of mind!
Matter, Form and Information Robert Pasnau wrote, “On one understanding of matter, it is the counterpart of form – the stuff that gets informed – so that whenever there is a form there must also be some matter that serves as its subject.” Reality comprises information. Information is something that needs a carrier, a structure, a syntax, a means of getting from here to there, something to bear it, to convey it. “Matter” – science, so to speak – needs mathematics to carry it, structure it, give it a syntax, order it, organize it, give it patterns, and transmit it, yet science dismisses mathematics as an unreal, manmade abstraction. Science has got rid of the very thing on which 100% of the information relies, and without which the information could not exist. So much for science. Science is unable to conceive that perceivable matter (the phenomenon) is conveyed by imperceivable mathematics (the noumenon). It is this idea – of an unobservable but wholly rational and logical structure of reality – that science ideologically cannot accept, because its whole schtick is based on observation, Step One of its defining method. It’s not the scientific method that makes science great. In fact, it’s the scientific method that stops scientists from thinking rationally and logically about reality. Ontological mathematics suffers from no such problem. It’s based on rational and logical thinking. Science ideologically and dogmatically cuts itself off from the rational and logical answer to existence because it privileges the limited, fallible, unreliable and delusional human senses over reason and logic. Reason and logic are the basis of the science of conceptualism (mathematics), rather than perceptualism (science). Pasnau wrote, “… there will often be hierarchies of matter, with the most basic stuff, prime matter, at the bottom, and various form–matter composites at higher levels, which may themselves be conceived as the matter for some further form. Wood, for example, is a form–matter composite that can itself serve as the matter of a bed.”
Science has never been able to define what prime matter actually is. How can you be a materialist unless you know what base matter is, matter in itself? What is the definition of matter in itself? Don’t ask a scientist. They wouldn’t have a clue. Where does all matter come from? What is prime matter, foundational matter? Science has no idea. That’s why science is a modeling system and not a truth system. It doesn’t know the truth of anything. Its proper job is just to produce useful models simulating phenomena. No one should mistake these models for reality. For science, nothing exists except matter, a purely sensible entity, which, by some miracle, can be made intelligible, but only by applying supposedly unreal, abstract, manmade mathematics to it. Why has this never struck any scientist as fundamentally absurd? It doesn’t make any sense at all. Science got rid of real Aristotelian form only to then replace it with “unreal” mathematics. What a joke. How can you explain reality via unreality?! It is in fact science that is an unreal, manmade abstraction – a modeling system, a simulation of reality yet anything other than reality. Science is what you get when you believe in the shadows on the wall in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and refuse to accept the true, real world outside. Scientists are all prisoners of their paradigm – their Cave of Shadows and Ignorance, from which they cannot, and refuse to, escape. Universal hylomorphism is the doctrine that every natural substance (everything found in Nature) is a composite of form and matter. Pasnau wrote, “Perhaps the most influential proponent of this view [of universal hylomorphism] was Solomon ibn Gabirol, the eleventh-century Jewish philosopher and poet. According to Gabirol, everything that exists has a form, because ‘every existence of a thing comes from form,’ and moreover ‘every difference [between things] occurs only through form’.” In ontological mathematics, everything comes from a Source Formula, and all things are wavefunctions that owe their existence to the sinusoidal waves generated by the Source Formula. Pasnau wrote, “… all beings, material and spiritual were standardly viewed as containing some form, and such forms are what give character to otherwise homogeneous matter. [SM: Note that science rejects any ‘spiritual’ order of
existence; everything is reduced to lifeless, mindless matter.] Gabirol’s further, highly controversial claim is that all created substances also contain matter.” Bonaventure accepted this claim: everything except God contains matter, and that includes all spiritual angels. Thomas Aquinas rejected this claim. Spiritual angels, he said, did not contain any matter. For Aquinas, each angel was sui generis (in a class by itself; ‘unique’). It was its own species. No two angels belonged to the same species. Where two humans always belonged to the same human species, two angels never belonged to the same angel species. Angels, in Aquinas’s system, are alone by essence and existence. They are pure forms. They possess no matter. By virtue of being immaterial, they must be distinguished from each other at the level of form rather than of matter, hence no two angels can share the same essential form. The form of every angel is, by definition, different from that of every other angel. Frederick Copleston wrote, “[For Aquinas] in the angels there is no matter, but there is none the less potentiality. (St. Bonaventure argued that because matter is potentiality, therefore it can be in angels. He was thus forced to admit the forma corporeitatis [form of the corporeal body] in order to distinguish corporeal matter from matter in the general sense. St. Thomas, on the other hand, as he made matter pure potentiality and yet denied its presence in the angels, was forced to attribute to matter an exigency for quantity, which comes to it through form. Obviously there are difficulties in both views.) The angels can change by performing acts of intellect and will, even though they cannot change substantially: there is, therefore, some potentiality in the angels. The distinction between potentiality and act runs, therefore, through the whole of creation, whereas the distinction between from and matter is found only in the corporeal creation.” For Aquinas, only one defining form applied to a human being to make a human a human. For Bonaventure, another form was required, the forma corporeitatis, which served as the form for the human physical body. For Aquinas, one form addressed the whole human. For Bonaventure, two forms were needed, one for spiritual existence and one for physical existence. At death, the physical
body died, but the spiritual body of the human soul remained. At resurrection, the physical body was restored. For Aquinas, the matter of a human being perished at death, leaving just the immaterial form of the human being. The material body was however restored at resurrection. But this raised the problem of how a human existed without a body between death and resurrection at the Last Judgment (the end of time). Pasnau wrote, “Many early scholastic authors, especially Franciscans, embraced this sort of view [of universal hylomorphism]. From the time of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, however, the view fell entirely out of favor, replaced by the idea that matter occurs only in the corporeal realm. Hence there arose the linkage we take for granted today, between corporeality and materiality, so that to be a body (corpus) is just to have matter.” It’s fascinating that science agrees with Aquinas that matter only exists in the corporeal domain, while a lot of New Age mysticism and esotericism agrees with Bonaventure that we have a spiritual body unencumbered by physical restraints. Out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences appear to support Bonaventure. Moreover, in our dreams – which plainly aren’t physical – we encounter “material” things and bodies, which aren’t corporeal. Therefore, matter, or its realistic semblance can exist outside the corporeal domain. Michael Sullivan wrote, “The doctrine of spiritual matter, or universal hylomorphism, which holds that there is a material as well as a formal component in spiritual creatures, was a subject of considerable debate in the late thirteenth century. It was commonly held by Franciscans and others whose thought has been described as ‘Augustinian,’ [Platonist and Neoplatonist] while rejected by Thomas Aquinas, his followers and others considered more ‘Aristotelian.’ Modern scholarship has almost universally accepted the assumption that the doctrine had its origins in the influence of the Fons vitae [Fountain of Life] of Avicbron, accepted by some scholastics in lieu of a robust Aristotelianism, and that it met its demise in the unanswerable refutations of Thomas Aquinas, after which the position was no longer tenable.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Aristotle’s definition of prime matter as pure potency means that everything that contains potency of any sort, even an angel, must contain matter. This universal hylomorphism leads in turn to Bonaventure’s
doctrine of being: ‘Matter gives independent existence (existere) to form, while form gives the act of being (essendi actum) to matter.’ Every created being (ens) is an ontological composite of independent existence (existere) and being (esse), where esse signifies the nature or essence of the thing. From rocks to angels, all creatures are true to the extent that the potencies of their ‘existence’ given by matter are realized through the perfection of their ‘being’ through form.” Science, in these terms, accepts only existence. It totally rejects being, i.e. the nature or essence of the thing. For science, existence can come from non-existence. That’s because nothing in science exists essentially. Something with essential existence – being – exists eternally and necessarily. Its essence is to exist and under no circumstances can it come from non-existence or be removed from existence. Imagine how different science would be if it were denied any way of referring to randomness, or existence randomly “emerging” out of non-existence. Imagine instead that it had to accept eternal being, eternal existence, existence that fully, permanently reflected the law of conservation of energy. The law of conservation of energy makes logical sense only if it applies to eternal things, but eternal things are rejected by science. Science is strictly about temporal things. It’s about temporal truths of fact, not eternal truths of reason. In ontological mathematics, the eternal and necessary domain of Being is the domain of essential existence. Its construct – the temporal and contingent domain of Becoming – is what science mistakenly thinks of as true existence. Science fails to understand that the material universe of spacetime has an essential mathematical underpinning of pure monadic mind, pure life, pure teleology, pure meaning.
Transcendent versus Immanent Truth Science is about immanent truth and denies the transcendent truth. Ontological mathematics is about both immanent and transcendent truth. Immanence concerns the empirical order of space, time and matter. Transcendence concerns the rational order of non-space, non-time and non-matter. Immanence concerns perceptualism, observation, that which is experienced. This is the arena of science. Transcendence concerns conceptualism, non-observation, reason and logic. Experience is entirely unnecessary. This is the base arena of ontological mathematics.
The transcendent order is the order that explains the immanent order. The Singularity that precedes, causes and explains the Big Bang is a transcendent Singularity. Science, which rejects the transcendent order because it is unobservable hence inaccessible to science, cannot and will never be able to explain the Big Bang. Instead of using a rational, logical, transcendent order of mathematics to explain the scientific world, science ludicrously claims that immanent existence – the spacetime universe of matter – randomly jumps out of non-existence, for no reason, via no mechanism, to no purpose. It has to do this – to invoke total absurdity – in order not to violate its own sacred paradigm. This makes science equivalent to blind religious faith that refuses to question itself. If science ever acknowledged that there was a more fundamental order of existence than the empirical scientific order, what would be the point of science? Science would be ditched and everyone would move on to the more fundamental subject (which is of course ontological mathematics). Rather than admit that it is false, that it is not the explanation of reality, that observation and experience are not the keys to unlocking knowledge of the universe, science chooses to dismiss transcendent rationalism and instead invokes transcendent randomness. Although there is no such thing as observable randomness – hence randomness, just like mathematics, cannot be part of the empirical scientific paradigm – science relies on randomness because it is the least costly addition to scientism. It is the minimal means of supplementing scientism with something non-scientific. No scientist appears to be aware that an immanent system of the temporal and contingent is incapable of explaining itself. A transcendent (non-immanent) factor is required. The transcendent feature least offensive to scientism is randomness – because it is the only transcendent factor that does not, to the illogical scientific mind at least, contradict science. (To any rationalist, the invocation of randomness, that which has no sufficient reason – chaos – is the end of science right there, and the beginning of magic and miracles, and the impossibility of logical, rational explanation.) Alternatives to randomness are things like “God”, “non-duality”, “bare awareness” “absolute consciousness”. All of these are totally unacceptable to science, as is the transcendent solution offered by pure rationalism, i.e. ontological mathematics.
Science, even though it is entirely dependent on mathematics, refuses to accept that mathematics is more real and more fundamental than science. Accordingly, science disastrously chooses randomness as its transcendent “explanation”, the only problem being that randomness explains nothing and is rationally, logically, ontologically and epistemologically impossible. It destroys the whole basis of causation and explanation. It is impossible for ontological randomness (chaos, the total absence of order) to be compatible with an ordered, causal universe. This is Cartesian substance dualism in its most extreme form. If it’s impossible to get mind and matter to coexist and interact, it’s even more impossible, even more ridiculous, to try to get randomness to coexist with, interact with, and even “cause” or trigger order. Science got rid of Cartesian mind because it was incompatible with matter. Randomness is even less compatible with matter than mind, yet scientists love randomness and invoke it all the time, whenever they can’t explain anything. Science loves randomness not because of what it is but because of what it’s not: it’s not God, metaphysics or mathematics. Science is not so much about asserting the reality of matter but denying the reality of God, metaphysics, mind and mathematics. Its combination of matter and randomness is how it asserts its atheistic, nihilistic, skeptical worldview, predicated on the meaningless, purposeless and pointless. Under no circumstances is any scientist allowed to introduce meaning, purpose or a point into science. That’s why mind – the basis of meaning, purpose and point – is fanatically excluded by science. Mind automatically conjures religion, spirituality, metaphysics, reasoning, conceptualism, teleology, ontological mathematics, and logic, hence why science will have nothing to do with it. Science is fatally undermined because it is not a system of causal closure. Wikipedia says, “Physical causal closure is a metaphysical theory about the nature of causation in the physical realm with significant ramifications in the study of metaphysics and the mind. In a strongly stated version, physical causal closure says that ‘all physical states have pure physical causes’ [Jaegwon Kim], or that ‘physical effects have only physical causes’ [Agustin Vincente].” Randomness isn’t a cause at all. It’s the exact absence of cause, which is why it is simply a synonym for chaos. You cannot invoke chaos to trigger physical causal closure, as science insanely does.
Science cannot explain itself. It has to go outside itself to get itself going. It needs a random event – i.e. a miracle – to get itself started. Science fails the McKenna Test. It is formally falsified by the McKenna Test. This is how we know for a fact that science is false, that science is wrong, that science cannot explain reality. So, what is the McKenna Test? Terence McKenna said, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing. … Well, I say then, if science gets one free miracle, then everybody gets one free miracle.” McKenna is absolutely right. If we’re in the game of granting a free miracle then the Christian God is every bit as good, or bad, an explanation for the Big Bang than “randomness”. We could never privilege one miracle over another. All miracles are ridiculous and unacceptable. Anything is just as viable as scientific randomness. In fact, it could easily be argued that randomness is the most absurd miracle of all, much more contrary to reason and logic (since it is the formal opposite of reason and logic) than anything else. Science actually relies on the biggest miracle of all – which is to say the worst miracle, the least acceptable, the most insane miracle – to get itself started, hence science is not the best system for explaining reality, but formally the worst! McKenna said, “The hard swallow built into science is this business about the Big Bang. Now, let’s give this a little attention here. This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. Well, now before we dissect this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity. Whether you believe this or not, notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely or less likely to be believed! I mean, I defy anyone – it’s just the limit case for unlikelihood, that the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant, for no reason?! – I mean, if you believe that, my family has a bridge across the Hudson River that we’ll give you a lease option for five dollars! It makes no sense. It is in fact no different than saying, ‘And God said, let there be light’. And what these philosophers of science are saying is, give us one free miracle, and we will roll from that point forward – from the birth of time to the crack of doom! – just one free miracle, and then it will all unravel according to natural law, and these bizarre
equations which nobody can understand but which are so holy in this enterprise. Well, I say then, if science gets one free miracle, then everybody gets one free miracle.” This is an incontestable, perfect demolition of science. If science cannot reply to McKenna, if it cannot give a sufficient reason for the Big Bang, then it should be rejected outright as any possible system of explanation for why we are here. It should be reduced to what it is, merely a practical model for providing useful heuristics concerning the observable world of phenomena. That’s what science truly is. It’s a modeling system with use value. It has no more truth value than the Abrahamic religion. It’s even more miraculous than Abrahamism. Its “explanation” for how existence came about could literally not be any worse. If it is so wrong about this, why would anyone imagine that it would be so right about everything else? The only system that is self-explaining and causally closed, with a sufficient reason for everything, is ontological mathematics, which is simply the ontology of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, i.e. it is how the PSR actually exists. The PSR exists as ontological mathematics. Ontological mathematics, an eternal and necessary system that generates the temporal and contingent universe, provides a sufficient reason for everything including itself – i.e. a full explanation of everything – because ontological mathematics is what the PSR actually is! If everything is made of ontological mathematics, which it is, then everything automatically has a sufficient reason, a definitive explanation, an infallible solution. Ontological mathematics is a system of Absolute Truth, beyond any possibility of doubt. It is an analytic, a priori, complete and consistent, holistic, coherent system. Thus it is nothing like scientific materialism!
Secondary Things Secondary things – temporal and contingent objects (the stuff of the spacetime universe of matter) – require primary things (eternal and necessary objects) to create them, to cause them. Science tries to explain reality via secondary things (observable phenomena). It ignores primary things (unobservable noumena).
The primary things of reality are eternal and necessary monadic minds. They are rational, logical, mathematical entities. They are not temporal and contingent scientific phenomena. They are not observables. It’s impossible for science to study core reality. Core reality is mathematical, not scientific. That’s why mathematics is at the core of science, and why science would fail immediately without mathematics. Science, because it is not a rational subject, mistakes dependent objects (temporal and contingent objects) for the independent objects (eternal and necessary objects) that make them. It fails to comprehend that all scientific objects are in fact ultimately mathematical objects. When it comes to science, appearances are always deceiving, but science always believes them. Science goes wrong immediately because, without any justification, it privileges perception over conception. It does so for reasons of ideology and dogmatism. It asserts that empiricism based on the human senses rather than rationalism based on reason and logic is the best means to interrogate reality. There was no spacetime perceptual world of matter before the Big Bang, so how could any rational person conclude that perception is the way to understand what came before the Big Bang? The entity that preceded the Big Bang was a mental entity, a conceptual entity, a mathematical entity, a Singularity. You use conceptual mathematics, reason and logic, to reach it. Behind science’s irrationalism is a constant fear of religion. Science believes that it must exclude any possibility of a religious order standing behind the scientific order and causing the scientific order. It also believes it must reject any possibility of a philosophical, metaphysical order, which it associates once again with religion. However, this approach also excludes the subject that actually does stand behind science as its cause – mathematics. We might say that mathematics is meta-science, the subject you reach when you go beyond science, to its foundations, to its cause. Science cannot accept that there is a meta-science that is more fundamental than science. Scientists are like people of faith. They have total faith in science and refuse to accept all evidence that shows that science is anything other than the bottom line of reality. No scientist will accept that science is only a limited human tool for heuristically modeling
the phenomenal, observable universe. Every scientist wants to believe that science is the subject, the subject that explains existence to us. It doesn’t. It gets nowhere near. It’s not even close. To invoke Wolfgang Pauli, it’s not even wrong! Mathematics does the job that scientists imagine science does. The only thing that science actually gets right is its use of mathematics! It’s only thanks to mathematics that science intersects with reality (mathematical reality). If you removed mathematics from science, it would be no better than a religion or a philosophy. It would have no connection to reality. Science is pseudo-mathematics. It’s a manmade empirical, perceptual misinterpretation of conceptual mathematics. All of science’s errors flow from its belief in matter, a perceptual entity. Reality is in fact made of sinusoidal waves, a conceptual entity. Scientists are unable to reorient their thinking away from perceptualism to conceptualism. Yet they produce theories that are almost entirely conceptual. Physicists talk about vanishingly small 1-dimensional strings of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions, which allegedly create every particle and force in the universe. What does that have to do with perceptualism? No one can see these strings and no one can see all of these extra dimensions. Science has completely departed from observation, from perceptualism, yet it refuses to embrace analytic, conceptual mathematics. How irrational can you get? The hatred of scientists towards reason, logic and mathematics is simply baffling, perverse … and unforgivable. Science is presenting a huge obstruction to human intellectual progress. Today’s scientists will be regarded as clueless by the intellectuals of the future, as people who wasted their careers on irrational nonsense.
The Trinity According to Christianity, God the Father begets god the Son – the Logos (intelligence) – as an intellectual reflection of himself. Through their mutual love, they breathe forth the Holy Spirit.
How could anyone ever associate Jesus Christ with intelligence? He never said one intelligent thing in his life. He never taught any philosophy, science or mathematics. But Pythagoras did all of that! Imagine if Pythagoras held the position now given to Jesus Christ. What a world it would be. Imagine an intelligent humanity!
Spiritual Hylomorphism Aristotelian hylomorphism involved three elements: 1) God (pure form; pure actuality), 2) prime matter (pure potentiality), and 3) Nature (form and matter combined). Aristotle had no need of explaining Abrahamic angels (he wasn’t an Abrahamist). Bonaventure and Aquinas did (they were Abrahamists). Bonaventure said that angels were made of spiritual matter and form. Aristotle, however, had never argued that matter could be spiritual. Aquinas said that angels were made of pure form. Aristotle, however, had reserved this status purely for God. For Bonaventure and for Aristotle, only God is pure actuality (pure form), hence all other creatures must have some measure of potentiality (matter). Bonaventure insisted that since angels did not have corporeal bodies (physical matter), they must therefore have spiritual bodies (spiritual matter). For Aquinas, only physical matter existed (he denied the existence of spiritual matter), so angels, since they were incorporeal, could not be associated with matter. The point here is that if you take Aristotle’s scheme and then extend it to include Abrahamic faith, which accepts the existence of angels, you then create tensions that break the coherence of the original scheme. Aristotle didn’t design his system to accommodate angels, but Bonaventure and Aquinas both had to use it for that purpose and they reached drastically different conclusions. (Faith and the inerrant Bible couldn’t help them.) Many theories in science have factors added in that then break the coherence of the theories. It would be better to start again, but science refuses to go back to first principles – because it doesn’t actually have any. Science is driven by its empirical method of observation, not by any sacrosanct rational and logical principles. Ontological mathematics, by complete contrast, is based on the PSR and Occam’s razor,
and places no reliance on observations by the limited, fallible, unreliable, delusional human senses. When ancient humanity observed the world, it reached the conclusion that the earth is flat (it isn’t), that the earth is at the center of the universe (it isn’t), and that the sun moves around the earth (it doesn’t … the earth orbits the sun). The delusions that afflict modern scientists, thanks to their fallacious observations, are no less serious than those of ancient humanity. They are simply of a subtler nature, hence are more difficult to refute using observational means. It took humanity thousands of years to comprehensively overturn geocentrism. It could therefore take eons to overthrown the much more deepseated sensory errors that now beguile scientists.
Spiritual Matter For Bonaventure, spiritual matter was found both in the angel and in the human soul. Spiritual matter, unlike physical matter, is never separable from its spiritual form. So, these spiritual substances are not subject to change. Unlike terrestrial, mortal, corporeal bodies, immortal spiritual bodies cannot die or decompose. Thomas M. Osborne Jr. wrote, “Bonaventure, following Avicebron and Alexander of Hales, believed in universal hylomorphism, holding that all substances, even the angels and human souls separated from the body, are comprised of matter and form. If the human soul apart from the body has its own matter, then in what sense can the soul be the substantial form of corporeal matter? … followers of Bonaventure held that the body has its own forma corporeitatis [corporeal form, the form of the corporeal body]. It is not surprising that some historians have regarded Bonaventure as a strong dualist. If the soul is a substance apart from the body, then how can it be one substance with the body? … In the thirteenth century, unibility describes the ability of two different substances or dispositions to become one supposit [an individual substance]. … The unibility of the soul plays a far greater role in the thought of Bonaventure than it does in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Bonaventure describes unibility as the specific difference between the angels and humans. Unlike Thomas, Bonaventure thinks that humans, like angels, have both a substantial form and spiritual matter. A human being differs from an angel in that a human’s form can also be the substantial form of a body.
[SM: An angel’s form has no association with a corporeal body; a human’s form does. A human is therefore a kind of angel, but with a physical body, something pure angels lack, but angels are therefore more intellectual than physical humans.]” Simon Burton wrote, “The view that spirits could be considered as in some way material ... seems to have been held by Augustine. While denied by Aquinas ... it was affirmed by a number of Franciscan doctors. The most influential of these was Bonaventure, who argued for universal hylomorphism in which all beings except God were considered to be composed of matter and form. He held that spiritual beings, while more simple than corporeal beings, were composed of both genus and difference and potency and act, describing potency and genus as a kind of spiritual matter and difference and act as its form. Like Baxter he particularly objected to the notion of angels as subsistent forms without an underlying (material) foundation.” Michael Sullivan wrote, “Natural philosophers conceive of matter insofar as it is the principle of extension and insofar as its being is in privation to substantial form, and so subject to generation and corruption; but this is matter only as it exists in a given realm, and not matter in its metaphysical generality ... matter which is the substrate of intellective forms is lifted above the being (esse) of extension and above that of privation and corruption, and for this reason is called spiritual matter.” Simon Burton wrote, “Bonaventure held that matter abstracted from all forms – what many later were to call ‘metaphysical matter’ (materia metaphysica) – existed as the metaphysical substrate of all created beings, but that this could not exist without its intrinsic determination (by forms) into a corporeal or spiritual mode of existence. This meant that while there was an underlying unity in our conception of matter, corporeal and spiritual matter were only analogously related.” These are intriguing considerations. The objects we create in dreams, which so strongly resemble those we find in the corporeal domain, are clearly drastically different. They operate by analogy with one another, by simulated similarity, but they are totally different things. In dreams, only our mind is involved in the creation of “matter”. In the “real” world, all minds are involved in creating matter. For Bonaventure, pure forms, with no material substrate, could exist only as ideals or archetypes in the mind of God. For Aquinas, pure forms could exist outside the mind of God – as angels! Are Aquinas’s angels therefore, in a manner of speaking, God’s
intellect projected into the universe? In that case, why did the Fall occur? Why did Lucifer and his rebel angels revolt against God? Did God have a psychotic breakdown when his own intellect turned against him? Is that when God’s Shadow – the Devil – came into existence?! ✽✽✽ According to Bonaventure, the matter of incorporeal substances, allowing them to receive form, is spiritual matter (materia spiritualis). This expresses what is contingent and limited, temporal and changing in every finite being. For Bonaventure, only God is infinite, unlimited, eternal, necessary and immutable. Only he is entirely free of matter. Bonaventure contended that the created soul is of its nature comprised of form and matter (i.e. spiritual matter). It’s therefore a complete substance, independent of the corporeal body. The corporeal body in turn is composed of matter and form (vegetative and sensitive forms), but, in a human, it is additionally informed by the rational form, which is supplied by the incorporeal soul. Bonaventure takes a “ghost in the machine” stance. The soul, with its spiritual matter, is more or less a separate, immortal being, inhabiting a mortal machine. Aristotle made the human soul depend on the body, so when the body died the human soul died with it. Bonaventure defined the soul as an incorporeal entity that could fully exist without the corporeal body, hence Bonaventure transcended the immanent Aristotelian position. For Aristotle, the soul is dependent on the body for its destiny. For Bonaventure, it isn’t. The soul is a substance complete and entire in itself, not indissolubly united to the body. The fate of the physical body is not its fate. Bonaventure’s system could easily have supported reincarnation rather than resurrection.
The Journey to God In Itinerarium mentis in Deum (Journey of the Soul into God), Bonaventure described how there were three grades or steps through which the soul ascends to God: similarity, vestige and image. Thanos Samartzis wrote, “Bonaventure endorses the Neoplatonic principle that beings are begotten by a first cause, which they reflect and to which they return. A relation of similarity (similitudo) is established between God and beings. Every being is a vestige (vestigium) or shadow (umbra) of God. However, a higher level of likeness is established between God and man: the intellectual being is an image (imago) of god. …
Bonaventure’s work Itinerarium mentis in Deum (among the most prominent in scholastic mysticism) spells out the idea of the gradual ascendance of the soul from sensible beings unto God.” Bonaventure said, “Every creature is a trace because it is from God, an image when it knows God, a likeness so far as God dwells in it. From this threefold gradation of relationship there follows a threefold gradation of divine cooperation.” The creature, the created being, is God’s trace (vestigium), image (imago), and likeness (similitudo). God is said to be imprinted in all of Creation. His trace is present throughout Nature, in the world and in humans, as created beings, made of corporeal matter. We can begin the journey to God by contemplating his imprint, his trace. When the soul reflects on itself deeply enough, it can discern the image of God (imago Dei). When the soul contemplates God closely enough, when it profoundly considers the idea of the most perfect being, when it ponders Anselm’s ontological argument and other proofs of God’s existence, the soul can achieve mystical union with God. It becomes the likeness of God. Gregory F. LaNave wrote, “[Bonaventure] summarizes what he has done as follows: ‘our mind has beheld God outside itself through and in vestiges, in itself through and in the image, and above itself through the similitude of the divine light shining on us and in that light’. The language here is a little deceptive, insofar as it suggests the following order of the text: stages one and two, vestiges; stages three and four, image; stages five and six, similitude. To be sure, the distinction of vestige, image, and similitude is a key Bonaventurean theme, but the way he commonly understands it does not correspond to such a division in the Itinerarium. The image of God is treated in stage three, insofar as the soul is both oriented to God as its object and is configured like God; the similitude of God is treated in stage four, insofar as the soul through grace has become like God.” Ontological mathematics is what takes you on the supreme journey to God and shows that you are an essential node of God. God cannot exist without you. You are an integral part of God, as is everyone else.
The Catholic Cannibal Thomas Aquinas proposed a thought experiment involving a cannibal. So, if someone does nothing but eat other people, none of his matter belongs to him. It belongs to other human beings, those he ate. Therefore, at resurrection, what matter is assigned to the cannibal? After all, every physical part of his body “belongs” to someone else. Aquinas wrote, “For in the resurrection this situation will obtain: If something was materially present in many men, it will rise in him to whose perfection it belonged more intimately.” Aquinas basically argues that everyone, at resurrection, gets back the matter most intimately connected to them. Whoever had the matter first will have it restored to him when all the dead are raised up. But what about the matter that is part of you that doesn’t belong to you, but to someone else (as in the cannibal case)? How can you be resurrected at all if none of the matter is yours?! Aquinas wrote, “…if something is lacking, it can be supplied by the power of God.” So, God miraculously supplies the rest! Phew. St. Augustine said of any recycled flesh that it “must be looked upon as bor- rowed by the other person, and, like a pecuniary loan, must be restored to the lender.” It is “owed” to the original owner and must be given back on the Last Day. In detail, Augustine said, “This leads me to reply to that question which seems the most difficult of all, to whom, in the resurrection, will belong the flesh of a dead man which has become the flesh of a living man? For if someone, famishing for want and pressed with hunger, use human flesh as food, an extremity not unknown, as both ancient history and the unhappy experience of our own days have taught us, can it be contended, with any show of reason, that all the flesh eaten has been evacuated, and that none of it has been assimilated to the substance of the eater though the very emaciation which existed before, and has now disappeared, sufficiently indicates what large deficiencies have been filled up with this food? But I have already made some remarks which will suffice for the solution of this difficulty also. For all the flesh which hunger has consumed finds its way into the air by evaporation, whence, as we have said, God Almighty can recall it. That flesh, therefore, shall be restored to the man in whom it first became human flesh. For it must be looked upon as borrowed by the
other person, and, like a pecuniary loan, must be returned to the lender. His own flesh, however, which he lost by famine, shall be restored to him by Him who can recover even what has evaporated. And though it had been absolutely annihilated, so that no part of its substance remained in any secret spot of nature, the Almighty could restore it by such means as He saw fit. For this sentence, uttered by the Truth, ‘Not a hair of your head shall perish,’ forbids us to suppose that, though no hair of a man’s head can perish, yet the large portions of his flesh eaten and consumed by the famishing can perish.” Cannibalism is a huge problem for resurrection, but has no bearing on reincarnation. Are resurrectionists secret materialists? They want to be bound to the same flesh forever. Reincarnationists are idealists. They focus on the mind, not the body. They are not attached to the notion of having the same body forever. A few humans are “mind people” (idealists). Most are “matter people” (materialists). They are mired in the flesh. Their body defines them, not their intellect.
Dreams “[Universal hylomorphism] claims that, with the single exception of God, everything is a composite of matter and form. This view is based on the twin principles that:(1) only God is absolutely simple, all creatures are in some way composite; and (2) composition is al- ways a case of matter and form, something relatively or completely indeterminate and something else that determines it. It follows that all creatures contain some kind of matter. Physical objects have ‘corporeal matter,’ but ‘spiritual’ creatures (e.g. angels or the soul) have a kind of matter too – ‘spiritual matter’.” – Sir Anthony Kenny All the matter that features in dreams might be called spiritual matter. It certainly isn’t corporeal matter, though the dream mind cannot distinguish between the two. The dream mind accepts dream matter as just the same as the corporeal matter of the real world. How does materialism account for that? It can’t. Why would anyone place their trust in senses that can’t even tell the difference between dream matter and “real” matter? What is dream matter made of? It clearly isn’t made of atoms, so why does the atomic (materialist) brain regard it as true matter? Don’t ask a scientist! In ontological
mathematics, “real” matter is sinusoidal, and so is dream matter, which is exactly why dream matter is accepted as real. David Keck wrote, “[For Bonaventure], matter is capable of being either spiritual (if joined to a spiritual form) or corporeal (if joined to a corporeal form), whereas for Aquinas ‘matter’ is always corporeal.” It’s extraordinary how little attention science gives to the question of “matter” even though it’s predicated on it. Clearly, the “matter” that features in our dreams is not the same as the matter that appears in the physical world, yet our mind, while dreaming, acknowledges no difference. Where will you find any science paper on that topic? A scientist wouldn’t know where to begin. All of these anomalies in science are just ignored. It’s exactly such anomalies that demand a paradigm shift. Scientism, as a paradigm, has failed as surely as all mainstream religions have. Its believers hang on to it because they are people of faith, not of reason and logic. They have faith in “matter”. Why? Because they are empiricists, and with extremely few exceptions, all empiricists are materialists. Bishop Berkeley was the most extraordinary empiricist because he was an idealist who flat out denied the existence of matter. Frankly, Berkeley’s system is far closer to the true than science. Berkeley’s problem, like that of all mainstream idealists, was that he didn’t have any mathematics in his system. Science succeeds because it does. Ontological mathematics is the ultimate game changer because it makes idealism mathematical, and thus we can get rid of scientific materialism. Is “spiritual” matter simply the capacity of mind to produce the simulacrum of matter in dreams? A soul is always connected to matter by virtue of the fact that, as dreams demonstrate, a soul can conjure matter into existence whenever it likes. The Big Bang was when the Cosmic Mind – the Singularity – created “matter”. Matter is never anything other than a mental construct. There is no such thing as scientific “matter”, independent of mind. Walter Stephens wrote, “[If spiritual matter existed] human senses could not detect it. Even Bonaventure’s angels would have to make themselves perceptible by creating a second body out of something more substantial, like compressed air.”
The human senses cannot detect the “matter” in a sleeping person’s dreams. All the observer can see is the sleeping person. The sleeper’s inner world is entirely invisible to others. An angel, if it were made of dream matter, would be just as invisible as all dream matter is. To be seen, it would have to manufacture a corporeal body for itself. Christians said that angels could make bodies out of the air. Can the mind, if powerful enough, if trained enough, project mental bodies that can be objectively seen by others? Many students of the esoteric refer to “emanation bodies”, “thoughtforms” and “tulpas”. Spiritualist Alexandra David-Néel claimed to have witnessed them in Tibet. She described tulpas as “magic formations generated by a powerful concentration of thought.” She even believed that tulpas could develop minds of their own: “Once the Tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker’s control. This, say Tibetan occultists, happens nearly mechanically, just as the child, when his body is completed and able to live apart, leaves its mother’s womb.” In a reality of mind, there is nothing to stop thought being reified, made objective. In fact, that’s all that the “real” world actually is – the reified thought of the collection of all monadic minds. Everyone sees the world because everyone was involved in making it. In a dream, you alone see the matter of the dream because you alone made it. Remember, minds see what they make. Individual minds make individual dreamworlds, which they see, but no other mind does. All minds together make the real world, which they all see. Can highly powerful and intuitive minds project inner mental content, or, alternatively, manipulate the external world to make it seem as if a body has been projected? Bear in mind that we actually live in a mental reality. We all exist in a Singularity, a mental space. Sufficiently powerful minds can indeed project bodies into the collective space. They are not of the nature of corporeal bodies, but they could fool the average mind, just as bodies in dreams seem entirely real although they are not corporeal. In these terms, angels would not make bodies out of air. Rather, they would project idealized (shining, aethereal) bodies.
Joseph W. Koterski wrote, “Now, while ‘material’ and ‘corporeal’ might seem to be synonyms, Bonaventure makes a distinction between them. In itself, matter is simply the ability to accept the form that will diversify it from any other creature. But as a complete lack of form, matter in itself is something more like ‘infinite possibility’ rather than ‘extension in space and time.’ In short, for Bonaventure matter in itself is indifferent as to whether it receives a spiritual form or a corporeal form, and thus he can speak about spiritual matter as well as about corporeal matter. ... Bonaventure contends that the human soul, although in itself a composite unity of matter and form, has a further natural desire for union with a physical body.” For Aquinas, the human soul is incomplete without a corporeal body. For Bonaventure, the human soul is complete up to a point without a corporeal body, but has a natural desire (and even compulsion) to be united to a corporeal body, hence is eager for bodily resurrection. Tobias Hoffmann wrote, “Bonaventure concluded that all creatures are composed of matter and form. This does not entail, however, that anything composed of matter and form is also composed of quantitative parts (i.e., parts with a certain extension), for Bonaventure carefully distinguished between matter, on the one hand, and extension on the other.” Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was absolutely clear that matter means extension, and mind means non-extension. This is wonderfully clear. Bonaventure’s system is not. In his system, matter can be both extended (corporeal) and non-extended (non-corporeal). Form can apply to both extended matter and unextended matter. Confusion reigns. Hoffmann wrote, “Quantity, not matter, makes something extended, i.e. corporeal. Accordingly, some things may be composed of matter and not be extended. This is the case with angels. Thus, angels are both material and spiritual, i.e. not corporeal. ... Even though angels are different in kind from corporeal creatures, they are individuated in the same way, i.e. as a result of their being composed of matter and form. Neither matter nor form taken by themselves accounts for the individuality of a certain thing. It is because of their union that a certain individual exists. Accordingly, Bonaventure could easily account for the numerical multiplication of angels within the same species.”
For Bonaventure, all humans belonged to the same species (the human species), and all angels also belonged to the same species (the angel species). For Aquinas, all humans belonged to the same species, but every individual angel was its own unique species. No two angels belonged to the same species, which is a rather odd thought. How can we even regard them all as “angels” if they do not belong to same species? Instead of being on a par with the word “humans”, “angels” becomes more akin to the word “animals”, a much more general word. (The word “animals” covers all different animal species.) Hoffman wrote, “[For Bonaventure] since it is not an angel’s form that accounts for that angel’s individuation, there is nothing in a certain form that prevents it from giving rise to different individuals by being united with matter several times. But individuals that have the same form are in the same species. Therefore, there can be several angels in the same species.” For Aquinas, the key to angelic individuation was form while for human individuation it was matter. For Bonaventure, it was both matter and form for angels and humans alike. Bonaventure argued that matter applies to beings not because they are corporeal, but because they are contingent. Matter can receive either spiritual or corporeal forms. Matter exists in order to receive form, to be informed.
The Law of Beauty Nietzsche said, “The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.” In ontological mathematics, beauty is an essential quality of the right answer to existence. Ugly configurations are countless. Beautiful configurations, by contrast, are extraordinarily rare. Anything that has beauty should immediately attract the utmost attention … the more beauty the more attention. The criterion of beauty supports Occam’s razor. We can get rid of all ugly “solutions” to existence. Science has nothing against ugly answers. In fact, it revels in them. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder wrote a book entitled Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. This
person does research in quantum gravity. Without even looking at her research, we can know it is completely wrong. When you oppose beauty, you are the one who is lost. Paul Dirac, one of the greatest physicists ever, said, “This result is too beautiful to be false; it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment. … If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one’s equation ... one is on a sure line of progress.” Dirac was a genius because he understood the critical importance of beauty. Hossenfelder will never make any significant contribution in physics because she doesn’t. Nietzsche said, “Real dancers are the ones who can hear the music in their soul.” People such as Hossenfelder are soulless, which is why they have no appreciation of beauty. Enough of these robot people, these zombie materialists.
Prime Matter “The essence of prime matter is potency. Since in itself it is potentiality only, and potentiality means nothing else but to be ordained to actuality, prime matter does not exist by itself. It is in potentiality to substantial form which gives it first act, simply the act of existence. Apart from form it has no existence, but with form it makes up the concrete individual thing. In a way it is a principle of actual existence, since a material form in itself is not a being but must inform some matter. Apart from its relation to form prime matter is not a reality, not even a potential being since nature cannot be defined or thought of unless in terms of this relation. Still prime matter is not simply a relation, because since relation is merely an accident it cannot constitute a substantial principle.” – Joseph M. Loftus The Catholic Encyclopedia says, “St. Thomas [teaches] that matter is the principle of individuation, but only as correlated to quantity. The expressions that he uses are ‘materia signata’ [signate, designated, particular matter], ‘materia subjecta dimensioni’ [matter subject to dimensions] … When actuated by form primordial matter has dimensions – the ‘inseparable concomitants that determine it in time and place’.” Joseph M. Loftus wrote, “Unmistakably St. Thomas holds that matter is the principle of individuation of material forms … not any matter whatsoever, but only designated matter (materia signata). ... What does St. Thomas mean by designated or ‘signed’ matter? He tells us himself: ‘By designated matter I mean matter considered under
determined dimensions.’ Commenting upon this passage … Maurer says that a thing is designated – he translates signata as ‘designated’ and equates designatum and signatum – when it can be pointed to with the finger. The individual thing can be pointed to but not defined; the universal is opposite in both respects [it can be defined but not pointed to]. In this way designated is equal to the demonstrative adjective. Derived meanings of the word are determined and limited. ... St. Thomas uses signata, designata, and determinata interchangeably … signed matter is considered with a determination of dimensions; unsigned matter without determination of dimensions. … Distinguishing between materia signata and materia non signata, St. Thomas says that signed matter has determined dimensions, i.e., of these or of those, while unsigned matter doesn’t have a determination of dimensions. St. Thomas later states again that matter in the singular is ‘matter existing under determined dimensions.’ … matter under certain dimensions is the cause of individuation. [It is dimensive quantity.]” Aquinas’s position regarding individuation – what distinguishes one person from another – is summed up as: “Matter, signed by quantity, is the principle of individuation, that is, of numerical distinction (which cannot be in pure spirits) of one individual from another in the same specific nature.” Joseph M. Loftus wrote, “St. Thomas explains particular matter succinctly as matter signed by quantity. … St. Thomas explicitly singles out quantity as absent from prime matter. Accordingly, as St. Thomas says, multiplication in a species is through dimensive quantity, materia quantitate signata.” In relation to the question, Whether God is composed of matter and form?, Aquinas referred to “Objection 3”: “Further, matter is the principle of individualization. But God seems to be individual, for He cannot be predicated of many. Therefore He is composed of matter and form.” Aquinas’s own reply to Objection 3 was: “Forms which can be received in matter are individualized by matter, which cannot be in another as in a subject since it is the first underlying subject; although form of itself, unless something else prevents it, can be received by many. But that form which cannot be received in matter, but is self-subsisting, is individualized precisely because it cannot be received in a subject; and such a form is God. Hence it does not follow that matter exists in God.” It’s remarkable how much the Scholastic philosophers tried to pin down the precise nature of their God, while most Christians couldn’t care less. They regard their God as
“an infinite mystery” – meaning that no questions can be asked of his nature, and no definitions given. God is simply the Magic Man, the sky wizard who can perform any miracle, no questions asked. Average believers have no interest in defining God. That could only get in the way of their beliefs. That’s why ontological mathematics is so important, and so different from everything else. It’s all about exact definitions. That’s the only way to know and understand. Science is so hopeless that despite espousing materialism it can’t even define matter, and basically says that matter randomly jumped out of non-existence! How can anyone take science seriously when it makes such claims, when it’s so reliant on its infinitely bizarre “free miracle”? As for Christians, they are as uninterested in defining God as scientists are in defining matter. They have a stunning lack of interest in the ontology of God. For the average Christian, it’s essential for them not to know the first thing about their God. Faith is their game, not knowledge. A believer never has to trouble himself with knowing anything, with having any clue what he’s talking about. All he has to do is assert his absolute faith in his magical Sky Wizard. Nothing else is required of him. It’s the easiest gig going, which is why so many people fall for it. If matter, the corporeal body, individuates the human soul during life, what individuates the human soul in the afterlife, when the corporeal body is absent? How can a person remain a distinct person? Bonaventure did not face this problem because he believed in the existence of non-corporeal spiritual matter, which served as the individuating factor. According to Christianity, everyone gets their corporeal body back at the Last Judgment (when the General Resurrection of the dead occurs). But what about the gap between death and resurrection? According to Catholicism, a particular judgment of each soul takes place before any general judgment. Wikipedia says, “Particular judgment, according to Christian eschatology,
is
the
divine
judgment
that
a
departed
person
undergoes
immediately after death, in contradistinction to the general judgment (or Last Judgment) of all people at the end of the world. ... Many Christians believe the dead are judged immediately after death and await judgment day in peace or torment ...” In this
view, you go to heaven, hell, or purgatory, at death, and then have to wait until the end of the world before you get your corporeal body back. According to Dante, the dead acquired temporary, virtual bodies to see them through to resurrection. In hell and purgatory, these were “aerial” bodies aka “shades”. Dante wrote, “… the nearby air takes on the form that soul impressed on it” – in other words, the soul, with no normal corporeal body to shape, shapes the air instead, as a simulacrum of the former physical body. Various Christian sects reject the concept of the particular judgment. Wikipedia says, “Some Christians believe that death is a period of dormancy, or sleep in the body, or an intermediate state, on Earth, or in the Bosom of Abraham, in which there is no consciousness and no Heavenly activity has yet begun – no judgment, no trip to heaven nor hell…” In this view, the dead person’s consciousness – in fact, their soul itself – is deactivated until the Last Judgment. No attempt is made to explain where the soul is and how it continues to exist during this period, even if “asleep” in some way. As ever, these knotty problems are just skipped over. The magical Sky Wizard is responsible for all the details! The Catholics, because they borrowed high-level philosophy from Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, were keen to attempt a detailed explanation of all phases of the soul’s existence, from creation, through mortal life, through existence in the afterlife (following death and the particular judgment), up to the Last Judgment, where the corporeal body was restored. Every Christian should be forced to explain what the soul is and where it goes at death. What is the soul made of? How does it operate? Catholicism had explanations based on pagan Greek philosophy, but no such explanations are available to the Protestants, the people of faith who reject all Greek philosophy as pagan and non-Biblical. By removing philosophy from Christianity, all the Protestants are left with are Bible quotations and their magical Sky Wizard. Most ordinary Catholics have no idea about Catholic philosophical theology, while Protestants don’t have any philosophical theology worth mentioning, so no typical Christian ever says anything remotely interesting about the soul. That doesn’t stop
them from being the most vicious trolls, savagely attacking anyone that doesn’t believe in the Sky Wizard. Isn’t it remarkable that people who place so much reliance on having a soul have so little interest in knowing what their infinitely precious soul actually is? Their refusal to find out tells you everything you need to know about these people. If matter, the matter that constitutes your body at any one time, is what individuates you from other humans (you have your matter, and they have theirs), what happens after death and before resurrection where you no longer have any matter (according to Thomas Aquinas’s theology)? What differentiates one soul from another? What prevents all souls, since they have no matter to individuate them, from collapsing into a Universal Soul, one big soulpool? For Aquinas, animals have corporeal souls that die with the body, while angels have incorporeal souls that never die, and humans are intermediate: they have immortal souls, but these are intimately related to corporeal bodies (as in animals, but as not in angels). Humans are, so to speak, animal-angels. Humans are like animals insofar as they are tied to bodies, and like angels in having immortal, immaterial souls. Animals die at bodily death. Humans do not. Angels do not have integral bodies at all. They are trans-body creatures (they transcend physical bodies). Humans are firmly embodied. An angel in Aquinas’s terms is pure form while a human is a form-matter composite. Although humans are essentially material beings – they are linked to material bodies – they are like angels (spiritual beings) in that their souls don’t cease when their material body dissolves. For angels, every angel is defined by a unique form (each angel is a different species). For humans, every human is defined by the same form (all humans belong to the same species). All humans have the form “human”, while every angel has its own separate form (they don’t all share one form “angel” … they don’t belong to one species; there are as many angelic species as there are individual angels). Creatures, such as humans, that are formally alike must be individuated by their matter. However, since all disembodied human souls are immaterial, matter, it seems, can no longer differentiate them in the afterlife.
Aquinas wrote, “For such things as agree in species but differ in number, agree in form, but are distinguished materially. If, therefore, the angels be not composed of matter and form... it follows that it is impossible for two angels to be of one species.” If humans have no material bodies after death and before resurrection, haven’t they become angels? They are no longer human. How does individuation apply to different members of the same species who no longer have matter to differentiate them? How does a human soul retain its individual identity after death and through the bodiless time before resurrection? The human soul, if we grant that it maintains continuity after death, seems not to be in a position to maintain individual continuity. All humans seem to merge into one species soul, yet no Christian believes such a thing, and Aquinas certainly didn’t. It appears that individuation cannot be explained by Aquinas’s own principles. He cannot account for the identity of the human person who has died. He cannot individuate souls after the deaths of their bodies. Humans all have the same form, the rational soul. It seems that all these souls must become the same once their individuating matter is dissolved. How would General Resurrection, bringing with it the return of individuating matter, then be able to identify which individuals to reconstitute? Of course, Aquinas refused to accept the conclusion seemingly forced on him by his own theology. He had to find a way out of his logical dilemma. It’s necessary to draw a distinction between numerical individuation and qualitative identity. Numerical identity is what makes something countable. Ten humans, for example, are countable because they are in ten material bodies and each body can be counted. But how would you count humans that you couldn’t see because they had no bodies? Without bodies, how would these humans even know they were different? Would they be like multiple personalities of a single organism? According to Aquinas, matter is what individuates humans. It is what makes humans countable. But what happens when matter is absent? Aquinas’s solution to the individuation problem of the dead human was “signate matter”. This is an extremely complex topic, much more complex than you might imagine – Scholastic philosophers wrote many long books on the topic, creating many
controversies – but it can basically be summed up as “body memory”, or body potentiality. The human soul after death loses its actual body, but it retains memory of its body. It has a body-shaped hole associated with it, so to speak, which will be filled at the General Resurrection. The body is an “absent presence”. Although the actual body vanishes at death, the concept of the body does not. It is hardwired to the human soul. A special configuration of the material world – your designated matter, your designated body – remains imprinted on your soul, allowing your soul to reactivate its body at the Resurrection. None of this is true of angels. Angels never had a body to begin with, so have no body memory. Bodies are not part of their angelic DNA, so to speak. There is no body-shaped hole that an angel needs to fill, or to which it remains connected, as potentiality. Human souls always carry body information, even when the body is gone. The actual material body becomes a potential material body, and it will be made actual again via resurrection. No such considerations apply to angels. Humans without bodies remain individuated because the temporary loss of the body does not change their essence. The matter of their body disappears in actuality, but not in potentiality. It is exactly this potentiality that God will turn into actuality when he resurrects everyone. God himself requires this information in order to bring about resurrection. Therefore, all that happens at death is that the human loses his explicit, observable, tangible body, but he does not lose his implicit body, the information regarding his body, and his body will then be perfectly reconstituted by resurrection. A dead human always retains the information that will enable resurrection to occur. No such information is ever associated with an angel, which never had a body, hence cannot be resurrected. There is nothing to resurrect. Angels are not distinguished from each other by bodies, but by intellects. Each is unique intellect. Thus spoke Aquinas. Where all humans in effect have the same potential intellect, which is made individual and actual for each unique human via the intellect’s specific interaction with a specific body, all angels are pure, active, actual intellects from the point of creation, and no two are the same. They all reflect the intellect of God in different ways. We might fancifully
say that the pure intellect of God could be reconstructed by adding together the different intellects of all the angels. The angels represent the division of God’s intellect into separate parts. God is the Total Angel Intellect, the Absolute Intellect. Angels reflect God’s intellectual activity separated into distinct parts. By the same token, we might say that humans represent what God would experience if God had a body. In fact, according to Christianity, God did have a body. That was the whole point of Jesus Christ. God became incarnate. God acquired a human body. The sum of all human bodies and experiences, including that of Jesus Christ, would amount to the total bodily experience of God. In other words, everyone is Jesus! The kingdom of God is inside us all. We are all made in God’s image. Jesus is the direct connection between God and humanity. In these terms, we can think of God as the Universal human body, and of all humans as the individual expressions of this Universal Body. Just as the sum of all angels constitutes the intellect of God (the Universal Intellect), the sum of all humans constitutes the body (human body) of God (the Universal Human – the Universal Jesus?). Similarly, all animals provide God with the Universal Animal experience, and all plants provide God with the Universal Plant experience. The Cosmos is God as matter. God is the summation of everything in the universe, the total of all thoughts, experiences and things. ✽✽✽ Wikipedia says, “…what is the matter of a substance that is not made out of any other substance? According to Aristotelians, such a substance has only ‘prime matter’ as its matter. Prime matter is matter with no substantial form of its own. Thus, it can change into various kinds of substances without remaining any kind of substance all the time.” So, “prime matter” is a kind of universal clay, waiting to be shaped, waiting to be given a substantial form. In ontological mathematics, there is no such as an unformed substance. Everything is inherently mathematically formed. Everything bears the sinusoidal form. Prime matter is impossible. Prime matter is reclassified as content (information carried) and is always
associated with form (the information carrier). All semantic experiences – everything we experience – is conveyed by syntactic form, which is sinusoidal form. Wikipedia says, “According to Aristotle’s theory of perception, we perceive an object by receiving its form (eidos) with our sense organs. Thus, forms include complex qualia such as colors, textures, and flavors, not just shapes.” The notion here is that when we encounter something, we extract all of the intelligible information from it, as forms (both substantial, i.e. essential, and accidental, i.e. nonessential). For Aristotle, our sense organs allow this (our intellect acts on what we observe). He was thus an empiricist. Plato, a rationalist, had a very different view. For him, the defining forms of reality were not natural to the sensible world. They belonged to the intelligible, immaterial, non-sensory world. We discovered ultimate reality via our intellect, not our senses. In ontological mathematics, reality’s own language – mathematics – alone tells us what things are. Manmade languages always falsify reality.
Empiricism “Nothing in the intellect unless first in the senses.” – Aristotle The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy said, “Nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu: The guiding principle of empiricism, and accepted in some form by Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Leibniz, however, added nisi intellectus ipse (except the intellect itself), opening the way to the view taken up by Kant, that the forms of reason form an innate structure conditioning the nature of experience itself.” Everything comes down to the issue of what is the intellect. Empiricism says that the sensory world must precede the intellect (matter precedes mind; sensible reality precedes intelligible reality) since, otherwise, the intellect would be empty and useless. Leibniz paved the way for the opposite viewpoint: Nothing in the senses unless first in the intellect (mind precedes matter; intelligible reality creates sensible reality, as per Plato) since, otherwise, the body would be undefinable and unknowable. Science – empiricism and materialism – ideologically privileges the senses over intellect. Ontological mathematics – rationalism and idealism – privileges the intellect over the senses.
Science has never once contemplated that rationalism and idealism are necessary preconditions for empiricism and materialism. It dogmatically rejects any such possibility, without a shred of justification. Kant, by building an intellectual framework into the mind, by which we understand the world (and without which reality could not be understood at all), could easily have transitioned into an advocate of ontological mathematics, by which eternal mathematical minds are the foundation of reality, and construct all reality from their own content, meaning that scientific matter does not exist at all, and the whole sensory world is mind-created, and has no existence otherwise.
Signate Matter After death, the human body – a specific, unique parcel of matter – vanishes. But the relation of the unique human soul to this specific matter – signed matter, signate matter – never alters. No other human can have a relationship with the designated matter that constituted your body. Each human has their own body, or their own DNA, as we would now say. If Aquinas had known about DNA, it’s clear that he would have used this to explain his theory of death and resurrection. Angels, without bodies, have no DNA. However, if we speak of bodiless, intellectual DNA – what makes a pure intellect that intellect and not a different intellect? – then all angels would be said to have unique intellectual DNA. In ontological mathematics, it’s their own sinusoidal composition. Humans, with bodies, have DNA. DNA is a biological code expressed via the physical body, but what if you abstracted the DNA as pure information, prior to being physicalized, DNA as a mental design template for a body? At death, the physical expression of the DNA – the actual body – would die, but the DNA as immaterial information would not die and would remain part of the human soul. Because everyone’s DNA is unique, yet also characteristic of the human species, we can have exactly the situation desired by Aquinas. After death, but before resurrection, each human remains a unique person, but also an integral part of the human species. Their DNA – which reflects the properties of the species – is universally reflective of humanity (and not of any other species). However, each manifestation of DNA is particular and not universal, i.e. each person is unique (they have unique DNA).
99.9% of our DNA is in fact the same as the person next to us, and we’re surprisingly similar to a lot of other living things. The genetic similarity between a human and a cow, for example, is 80%. About 60 percent of our genes have a recognizable counterpart in the banana genome. And human DNA is 98% the same as chimpanzee DNA, all of which suggests that God was an Evolutionist rather than a Creationist! If God was a Creationist, humans – made in God’s image, unlike anything else on earth – would have 0% genetic similarity to anything else. DNA refutes Creationist Christianity! DNA, as pure information, is the key that unlocks Aquinas’s puzzle. Our DNA signature makes us unique, and as long as our soul retains this DNA signature, then, even without a body, we retain a unique identity, something that makes us uniquely us and not anyone else. At resurrection, this DNA information can then be activated and turned into a “glory body”, a resurrection body. Moreover, God, as part of his resurrection service, can correct any DNA errors, thus giving everyone their perfect body. He can even enhance some features – by divine genetic engineering – to furnish the complete “glory” body. Catholic apologist Dr Taylor Marshall asked, “Do you know the four properties of a glorified resurrected human body?”. His answer was: “Sacred Scripture and Catholic theology teaches that our glorified resurrected bodies will experience four properties as an outflow of the beatified soul enjoying the vision of God’s essence: 1) Impassibility – the glorified body will no longer suffer physical sickness or death, as Saint Paul teaches regarding the glorified body in 1 Corinthians 15:42, ‘It is sown in corruption, it shall rise in incorruption.’ 2) Subtlety meaning that we will have a spiritualized nature in the sense of a spiritual body as did our Lord as we learn at 1 Corinthians 15:44: ‘It is sown a corruptible body, it shall rise a spiritual,’ i.e. a spirit-like, ‘body.’ We see that Christ’s glorified body was able to pass through closed doors. 3) Agility – the glorified body will obey the soul with the greatest ease and speed of movement as we read in 1 Corinthians 15:43: ‘It is sown in weakness, it shall rise in power,’ that is, according to a gloss, ‘mobile and living.’ Saint Thomas Aquinas says, ‘But mobility can only signify agility in movement. Therefore the glorified bodies will be agile.’ We discern agility our Resurrected Lord’s ability to bilocate and travel great distances in an instant. 4) Clarity – the glorified body will be free from any deformity and will be filled with beauty and radiance as we read at Matthew 13:43: ‘The just shall shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father,’ and Wisdom 3:7: ‘The just shall shine, and shall run to
and fro like sparks among the reeds.’ Here clarity refers not being ‘clear’ but to being ‘bright.’” Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Thus also will his body be raised to the characteristics of heavenly bodies – it will be lightsome (clarity), incapable of suffering (impassible), without difficulty and labor in movement (agility), and most perfectly perfected by its form (subtlety). For this reason, the Apostle speaks of the bodies of the risen as heavenly, referring not to their nature, but to their glory.” So, resurrection is actually a bit of a cheat. It doesn’t give you back your body as you knew it. It gives you a body with radically different properties, ones that would have made your life experience as a mortal completely different had you possessed them. Have you been “resurrected” or have you been transformed, transmuted? Have you undergone a metamorphosis? You are something like a butterfly. Wikipedia says, “Butterflies have the typical fourstage insect life cycle. Winged adults lay eggs on the food plant on which their larvae, known as caterpillars, will feed. The caterpillars grow, sometimes very rapidly, and when fully developed, pupate in a chrysalis. When metamorphosis is complete, the pupal skin splits, the adult insect climbs out, and after its wings have expanded and dried, it flies off.” Human life on earth is like that of an egg turning into a caterpillar. Death is like the chrysalis stage, and resurrection delivers a radically different creature – the beautiful soul-butterfly. Aquinas wrote, “He who fashioned nature will wholly restore the body’s nature at the resurrection. Wherefore whatever defect or deformity was in the body through corruption, or weakness of nature or of natural principles (for instance fever, purblindness, and so forth) will be entirely done away at the resurrection: whereas those defects in the human body which are the natural result of its natural principles, such as heaviness, passibility, and the like, will be in the bodies of the damned, while they will be removed from the bodies of the elect by the glory of the resurrection.” So, the saved will become butterflies while the damned will remain caterpillars. Angels have zero percent human DNA, hence have nothing in common with any life on earth.
Ontological mathematics might be likened to an angelic system of sorts – of uncreated angels. All eternal monadic minds are pure immaterial beings. They have no Creator. They are not assigned to any specific portion or composition of matter. They are not tied forever to a unique DNA code. The collection of all angels constitutes God. God is the Collective Angel. Rather than being tied to one DNA code (as humans in the Creationist scheme of resurrection are), monadic angels are reincarnational. This means that each monad can keep linking to new DNA, i.e. it can keep changing its body, keep having different experiences, keep learning new things, keep trying out new identities. It’s an explorer of different kinds of life, via different avatars (bodies), rather than being restricted to just one. Resurrection: a created soul is assigned to a specific body via a specific DNA code designed by the Creator. Reincarnation: all souls are eternal (there is no Creator). An individual eternal soul links to a specific body (the body is defined by its DNA code). At death, the body perishes with its DNA. The eternal soul lives on and links to a new body, and thus new DNA, via reincarnation. With resurrection, a Creator ties a created soul to a created body via fixed DNA. The created soul is linked to its created body forever. Even when its body dies, the code remains to reconstitute it (via resurrection). With reincarnation, there is no Creator. Evolution applies. Bodies and their DNA are always changing, according to evolutionary pressures and teleological striving. Souls are not assigned to specific bodies; they acquire one body after another as they make their way through the great journey of life. They are linked to ever-changing DNA codes. Nothing is fixed. Souls do not have a permanent physical identity, defined by their body. What Aquinas called “signate matter”, could now be rebranded as “immortal DNA” – a specific physical code for each person. Angels – eternal monadic minds – have no signate matter, no designated DNA. They can keep linking to a different DNA code with each new avatar (body) they acquire.
Aquinas wrote, “…matter is not divisible except by quantity. Therefore the Philosopher [Aristotle] says that if quantity were removed, a substance would remain indivisible: hence matter is made to be this matter and is signate inasmuch as it exists under dimensions.” Quantity and extension (dimensionality) are closely related. Quantity must have dimensions in order for it to be true that its absence would render something indivisible. Aquinas wrote, “Dimensions, however, can be considered in two ways. 1) In one way according to their termination, and I say that they are terminated according to limited measure and figure; and so, as complete beings, dimensions are classed in the genus of quantity, and thus they cannot be the principle of individuation: because such termination of dimensions may frequently vary in regard to the same individual, and in such case it would follow that the individual would not remain numerically the same.” The idea here is that you do not have a fixed quantity. Your weight, for example, is always changing. You are always taking in new matter and expelling matter by various means. It’s not specific matter that makes you you. You are not tied to specific atoms. Rather, you are expressed via the general organization of matter that stays roughly the same moment by moment but is certainly not identical moment by moment. Aquinas wrote, “2) In another way, dimensions may be considered without this certain determination, merely in the nature of dimension, although they never could exist without some kind of determination; just as the nature of color cannot exist without determination to white or black; and according to this aspect dimensions are classed in the genus of quantity as imperfect. And by these indeterminate dimensions matter is made to be this signate matter, and thus gives individuality to a form, and thus also by matter there is caused the numerical diversity of things in the same species.” The idea here is that dimensions can be fixed or flexible. Signate matter requires dimensions to be flexible to accommodate bodily changes. Imagine a body as purely fixed, with an exact number of fixed atoms. It would be impossible for a person to change. A fixed body would have fixed dimensions. Signate matter requires bodies not to be fixed. Bodies can expand and contract. They can change. It’s
this signate matter that makes a body what it is, not inflexible matter of a fixed quantity and fixed dimensions. Signate matter accommodates change. Fixed matter does not. Aquinas wrote, “Therefore it is evident that matter, according as it is considered in itself, is not the principle of diversity, either according to species or according to number; but as it is the principle of generic diversity inasmuch as it is considered the subject of a common form, so it is the principle of numerical diversity inasmuch as it is considered as subject to indeterminate dimensions. Therefore also, since these dimensions are in the genus of accidents, diversity according to number is reduced to diversity of matter, or to accidental diversity, according to the nature of the aforesaid dimensions. Other accidents, however, are not principles of individuation, but they are the principle of knowing the individual to be distinct. In this way individuation is also attributed to other accidents.” A modern-day scientific materialist would agree with Aquinas in many ways. DNA is the code for signate matter that makes every human a specific individual. Scientists don’t believe in any soul, of course. For them, the mind (soul) is not something that attaches to a body. It is actually encoded in the DNA. DNA defines the mind, the soul, and, when the body dies, it takes its DNA and mind/soul with it, permanently. Aquinas wrote, “When the Philosopher says that those things are numerically one in which the matter is one, this must be understood of signate matter which is the subject of dimensions; otherwise it would be necessary to say that all generable and corruptible things are numerically one, since their matter is one.” It’s not the possession of matter per se that makes you you. It’s the particular organization of your matter, determined by your DNA that defines you. At least, that’s what a scientist would say. But what about absolutely identical twins? The thing that actually makes you an individual is your soul, not your body. Identical twins may be identical physically, but they are not identical in terms of their souls. Aquinas wrote, “Since dimensions are accidents, they cannot per se be the principle of the unity of an individual substance; but matter, inasmuch as it underlies such and such dimensions, is understood to be the principle of this unity and of this multitude.”
Dimensions change because the matter associated with them changes. The matter is the important factor that determines the dimensions. It’s not the dimensions that determine the matter. Aquinas wrote, “It is according to the nature of an individual thing that it be undivided in itself, and divided from other things by an ultimate division. No accident, however, has in itself the proper nature of division, unless it is quantity; therefore dimensions of themselves have a certain nature of individuation according to a determined place, inasmuch as place is a difference of quantity. Thus there is a twofold meaning of individuation: the one on the part of a subject, and this is the same for any accident; the other meaning, on the part of individuation itself, inasmuch as it has place, by reason of which, in abstracting from sensible matter, we may imagine this line and this circle. Hence it rightly pertains to matter to individuate all other forms, because it gives to this form, which of itself has the nature of individuation, that it also be terminated by those dimensions that are found in a subject now made complete; accordingly they are individuated by matter which is individuated by indeterminate dimensions conceived of as in matter.” At each moment, we are defined by a certain quantity of matter, with certain dimensions. The quantity of matter and thus the dimensions associated with it are always changing. It is the dynamic quantity of matter that defines us, not a fixed quantity. It would be an extraordinary world if all things had a fixed number of atoms, and their atoms were never allowed to change. People would be more android than human. Eating and drinking would be redundant. How would people have children? Aquinas wrote, “Things that differ numerically in the genus of substance, differ not only because of accidents, but also by reason of form and matter; but if it is asked how this form differs from that, the only reason can be that it is in other signate matter. Nor can there be found another reason why this matter is divided from that except by reason of its quantity. Hence matter subject to dimension is understood to be the principle of this kind of diversity.” So, a person is a person because of the particular quantity of matter, with its particular dimensions, that defines them at each instant. At each instant, your matter is yours, and not anyone else’s.
Aquinas wrote, “This reasoning relates to completed accidents which follow upon the existence of a form in matter; but not to those indeterminate dimensions which may be conceived of before the reception of the form in matter. For without these, a thing cannot be understood to be individual, any more than it can be conceived of without form.” Dimensionality must be mutable in order to accommodate a mutable human being. A fixed form is not applied to fixed matter. It is applied to matter that can change as it goes along. We stay the same even though our matter changes through the course of life, but we always have a characteristic material organization that makes us recognizable as us. Aquinas wrote, “Number, formally speaking, is prior to continuous quantity: but materially, continuous quantity is prior, since number is the result of the division of a continuum … In this way, division of matter, according to dimensions, causes numerical diversity.” To create individual things, you divide matter into parcels. These parcels may be quite fixed in inanimate things such as rock (although they will of course be subject to erosion, and so on), but they are much more dynamic in animate bodies. Aquinas wrote, “Only signate matter is the principle of individuation. I call signate matter matter considered under determinate dimensions. Signate matter is not included in the definition of man as man, but signate matter would be included in the definition of Socrates if Socrates had a definition. In the definition of man, however, is included non-signate matter: in the definition of man we do not include this bone and this flesh but only bone and flesh absolutely, which are the nonsignate matter of man.” A human would be defined as a compound of form and matter. This definition does not pick out a particular individual human, such as Socrates. A particular person is defined with regard to their particular matter, their signate matter, unique to them. In terms of DNA, all humans share the DNA that produces humans, as opposed to dogs, cats, or whatever. There is no absolute human DNA, of which all particular humans are modifications. Rather, all humans have their own unique DNA, but there is very little differentiation from one human to another. William James said, “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very
important.” This is how it goes with DNA. There is little difference between the DNA of one human and another, but the little difference is what makes us unique individuals, in terms of our physical bodies. If you took every human and averaged their DNA, would the resultant DNA represent the Universal Human, the Human of which all humans were a minor modification? Would the Universal Human be a Superman, the most perfect human of them all, every oddity and quirk averaged out, leaving the very best human, or would it be the Last Man, literally the most average, most mediocre human possible? The essence of man concerns non-signate matter. An actual man is defined by signate matter. Aquinas wrote, “For the designation of the individual with respect to the species is through matter determined by dimensions, while the designation of the species with respect to the genus [the higher taxonomic rank] is through the constitutive difference, which is taken from the form of the thing.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to bring back all the great philosophers in the present day, and have them adjust their philosophies in the light of all the discoveries since their deaths? They would all end up as ontological mathematicians!
One Intellect? “For it has been proved that the substance of the intellect is united to the human body as its form. But one form cannot possibly exist in more than one matter, because the proper act comes to be in the proper potentiality, since they are proportioned to one another. Therefore, there is not one intellect of all men.” – Thomas Aquinas A fierce debate arose amongst interpreters of Aristotle as to what he had in mind regarding the “active intellect” versus the “passive intellect”. Herbert Davidson wrote, “Just what Aristotle meant by potential intellect and active intellect – terms not even explicit in the De anima and at best implied – and just how he understood the interaction between them remains moot. Students of the history of philosophy continue to debate Aristotle’s intent, particularly the question whether he considered the active intellect to be an aspect of the human soul or an entity existing independently of man.”
Wikipedia says, “The early Greek commentators on Aristotle, in particular Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, gave several different interpretations of the distinction between the active and passive intellects. Some of them regarded the active intellect as a power external to the human mind, Alexander going so far as to identify it with God. ... Alexander identified the active intellect (nous poietikos), through whose agency the potential intellect in man becomes actual, with God. … The more strictly Aristotelian Muslims (in particular Avempace and Averroes) wrote about how one could conjoin oneself with the active intellect, thus attaining philosophical nirvana.” Imagine a divine intellect, the Universal Intellect, which connects to every particular intellect. This would mean that all intellects could agree since, at their highest level, they all link to the same source. Wikipedia says, “The reason of the Islamic and Jewish Aristotelians for positing a single external Agent Intellect is that all (rational) human beings are considered by Aristotelians to possess or have access to a fixed and stable set of concepts, a unified correct knowledge of the universe. The only way that all human minds could possess the same correct knowledge is if they all had access to some central knowledge store, as terminals might have access to a mainframe computer. This mainframe is the Agent Intellect, the ‘mind’ of the universe, which makes all other cognition possible.” The Mind of the Universe is in fact ontological mathematics, which is to say the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Each individual monadic mind is an instantiation of the PSR. All monadic minds obey the same defining formula. All can therefore agree on the ultimate, objective Truth. Although Aristotle did not believe in a personal afterlife, he believed that each human had access to the active intellect and that this part of each human survived death. This part was actually God. Aquinas challenged this position. Wikipedia says, “Thomas Aquinas elaborated on Aristotle’s distinction between the active intellect and passive intellect in his Disputed Questions on the Soul and his commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, arguing, against Averroes, that the active intellect is part of the individual human personality.” So, for Aquinas, the active intellect was human, while for several of his rival interpreters, it was divine. Aquinas also denied the possibility that one person could do the thinking for another. He wrote, “Moreover, every mover ought to have its proper instruments;
the flute-player uses one kind of instrument, the builder another. Now, the intellect is related to the body as its mover, as Aristotle shows in De anima III. So, just as it is impossible for the builder to use a flute-player’s instruments, so is it impossible for the intellect of one man to be the intellect of another.” Wouldn’t it be extraordinary if we could hijack another person’s intellect? But isn’t this in fact what humanity is all about? We are all exposed to various ideas and become colonized by some ideas while we resist others. We inhabit a memetic field, where people are constantly choosing which memes appeal to them, and which don’t. In the end, it’s all just a big meme popularity contest – until one group becomes so dominant that everyone else will have to fall in line, or become extinct. That’s what Illuminism will deliver in due course.
Substantial Forms Before the rise of modern science, the theory of substantial forms was the means to understand reality. Wikipedia says, “A theory of substantial forms asserts that forms (or ideas) organize matter and make it intelligible. Substantial forms are the source of properties, order, unity, identity, and information about objects.” In scientific materialism, matter is used to explain everything, but the curious thing about matter is that it’s sensible (observable), but not intelligible. No one can look at matter and know what matter actually is. To this day, no scientist can define what matter is in itself, or even if there is any such thing (science never has and never could refute any idealist philosophy; it can’t even refute dialectical materialism, which, if combined with mathematics, would actually be a vastly superior version of materialism, much closer to Hegelian idealism). Matter will never be successfully defined by a scientist, because there is no such thing as matter in the scientific sense. Matter will remain a heuristic to be inserted into scientific models of the observable, phenomenal world. Science got rid of intelligible substantial form (that which makes a substance intelligible) and replaced it with unintelligible, sensible matter. By itself, this would have been an insane move, but science did in fact have something other than substantial form to appeal to in order to introduce intelligibility to science. It
had mathematics. And that proved an act of genius, elevating science above everything else. Almost overnight, Scholastic philosophy was wiped out. The theory of substantive form was metaphysical. It wasn’t quantitative. You couldn’t work out anything with it. You couldn’t predict anything. Once mathematics was introduced, everything changed. Now the world was quantitative. Now things could be calculated. Now answers made their appearance in the world. Now people could accurately predict phenomena. The power of materialism flows entirely from its use of mathematics, the subject that makes it quantitative. No subject can ever rival science unless it becomes mathematical too. Ontological mathematics ushers in the ultimate intellectual revolution because it does for idealism what mathematics did for materialism. It makes idealism a quantitative subject and purges it of all the subjectivist, relativist drivel that has always marred the progress of idealism and given it such appeal to crazy woo woo fans, especially all those that believe in cosmic consciousness, absolute consciousness, bare consciousness, non-duality, meditation and mindfulness. Ontological mathematics renders reality quantitively mental rather than quantitively physical. That’s the game changer. It changes everything. The reign of lifeless, mindless, meaningless, purposeless, pointless matter comes to end. Wikipedia
says,
“The
concept
of
substantial
forms
dominated
ancient
Greek philosophy and medieval philosophy, but has fallen out of favor in modern philosophy. The idea of substantial forms has been abandoned for a mechanical, or ‘bottom-up’ theory of organization.” Science is predicated on atoms and subatomic particles. Everything is built up from there. There is no top-down thinking in science. Bottom-up thinking is inductive. You look around and try to build up a picture of reality from particular observations. Top-down thinking is deductive. It starts from universal principles. In the case of ontological mathematics, it starts from one master principle: the PSR. Wikipedia says, “…mechanistic treatments have been criticized for the same reasons atomism has received criticism, viz., for merely denying the existence of certain kinds of
substantial forms in favor of others (here, that of atoms, which are then thought to be arranged into things possessing accidental forms) and not denying substantial forms as such, an impossible move.” So, for science, atoms are the essence of things – the ultimate substantial forms – from which all temporal and contingent things are made. The central problem here, of course, is that atoms themselves are temporal and accidental things. They are accidental forms, not substantial forms. They are not what truly defines things. In ontological mathematics, the substantial forms – the eternal and necessary things – are sinusoidal waves, and all temporal and contingent accidental forms are made from them. Not only are the basis sinusoidal waves the substantial forms that define everything (they are the syntax of reality), they are also prime matter (the semantics of reality), reality’s empirical aspect that can be experienced. Sinusoidal waves account for rationalism via syntax and empiricism via semantics. This is the sole way to bring rationalism and empiricism into one system at the ultimate level. Kant tried to unify rationalism and empiricism, but only produced a phenomenal scheme, leaving noumenal reality untouched and unknowable. Ontological mathematics furnishes the noumenal unification of syntax and semantics, form and content, rationalism and empiricism, mathematics and science, by delivering a dual-aspect monism of the information carrier (the intelligible aspect of reality, fully knowable via mathematics) and the information carried (the sensible aspect of reality, the part of reality that we experience, lived reality … all of our perceptions, feelings, mystical intuitions, inner drives, appetites, will, and so on). The great mystery of how to bring rationalism and empiricism into a single coherent system has been finally and definitively solved, via information. Information has two aspects: the information experienced, and the carrier of the information. These are not two separate things. The mistake of Plato and Aristotle was to make matter one thing and form something completely different: an impossible substance dualism that has always bedeviled philosophy. Matter is simply the sensible aspect of its form. It can’t be separated from form. It can’t exist without form, even in principle. Content is always tied to form.
Humans imagine that containers and their contents are different things, that map and territory are different. Ontologically, in terms of Nature, the container is the information carrier (the sinusoidal wave) and that which is contained is whatever experience is associated with the specific sinusoid. As the simplest example, one sinusoid delivers the experience of the color red, while another sinusoid, with a higher frequency, delivers the experience of the color blue. To produce a completely different experience, we simply use a different frequency of sinusoid. Different experiences are encoded in different frequencies, in different syntax. The syntax is the “map”, and the semantics is the territory that accompanies it. While we can mathematically specify a priori what frequency we wish to analyze, we can never know beforehand what experience we are going to get in relation to that frequency. No one knows what blue looks like by being shown the frequency associated with blue. You actually have to encounter the wave associated with blue to experience blue. Syntax is a priori (rationalist), while semantics is a posteriori (empiricist) … only when we have actually encountered the thing do we experience it. We can know all about its mathematical syntax beforehand, but have no clue what actual experience it will produce until we actually encounter it. The experience is always a posteriori. This is exactly where rationalism and empiricism clash head on. Rationalism is all about knowing things without observing or experiencing them. Rationalism is a priori. It is therefore not scientific. It concerns mathematical syntax, and this is eternal and necessary. The basis waves (sinusoids) of basis ontological syntax can be placed in temporal and contingent combinations (thus producing wavefunctions, which include all the “material” things studied by science). We can understand mathematical syntax fully without doing a single thing associated with science. What we can’t know – which is why there is such a thing as science – is what wavefunctions will look like or how they will be experienced. That’s where the a posteriori order of empiricism kicks in, the semantic order upon which the scientific order depends for its phenomenal observations. What science is really doing, although it doesn’t know it, is trying to work out from something’s phenomenal appearance what its noumenal syntax – its substan- tial form
– is. It’s trying to understand what the thing in itself is, but it is not consciously aware of doing this. Science instead consciously assigns itself a different task. It believes that what it sees is the thing in itself (seeing is believing), that what it sees has no hidden, noumenal aspect, unavailable to scientific observation and experimentation. However, a semantic observable is not an intelligible. To make observables intelligible, science has to apply mathematics, which it regards as an unreal, manmade abstraction. This of course makes no sense. How can the intelligibility of something reside in unreality and abstraction, and be made up by the human mind? Science is basically saying that reality in itself is unintelligible, yet a manmade subject called mathematics can render it intelligible, meaning that humans are responsible for the intelligibility of the world, hence without humans the world would be unintelligible (!). Kant played the same game. He said that the human mind imposed phenomenal knowability on reality. Without the human mind, reality, both noumenally and phenomenally, would be unknowable, unintelligible, an infinitely mysterious and impenetrable mystery, where only faith could apply (actually, without human minds even faith would be out of the game). Science is just a mathematical version of Kantianism. Instead of applying Kant’s categories of the understanding – innate aspects of the human mind – to unknowable reality, science applies manmade mathematical abstraction. Mathematics replaces Kant’s categories of the understanding, thus allowing science to gain a description of phenomena, but noumenal reality, reality in itself, remains as impenetrable as before, as it was with Kant, and for the same reasons. However, bizarrely, science then makes the claim, which Kant certainly didn’t, that phenomenal reality is reality, i.e. there is no unobservable, hidden, noumenal reality. Dark energy, dark matter and the unreal, mathematical abstractions of quantum mechanics, amongst many other things, refute the scientific claim that reality is observable, but science doesn’t care about any of these objections. It just goes on believing that seeing is believing and that you must first observe reality and then apply unreal mathematics (!) to it in order to understand it.
It’s extraordinary that anyone anywhere thinks that science makes any sense. People keep confusing its practical success – its use value, its value as a modelling system, as a simulation of phenomenal reality – with its supposed truth value (is it really telling us what reality is and how it functions?). Science doesn’t have any truth value any more than Kant’s domain of phenomena has any truth value (all of the truth of Kant’s system resides in the noumenal domain, which Kant insisted was unknowable!). Where Kant claimed that the form of reality was unknowable, science claims that unreal, manmade mathematics somehow reveals it (by what miracle?). Plato and Aristotle asserted that real but metaphysical forms revealed it. Ontological mathematics says that the PSR is the ultimate form of reality, which we can completely know
via
mathematics
(monadic,
sinusoidal
mathematics),
which
is
its
ontological expression. The intelligibility of reality is all about Form. The fundamental question is what is the ultimate Form. According to Kant, it’s unknowable. According to science, it’s unreal mathematics conditioned by observable reality. According to Plato, it’s the Form of the Good. According to Aristotle, it’s God – pure Form, pure actualization. According to ontological mathematics, it’s the PSR, the Absolute Form/Idea. The Form-based understanding of reality advanced by Plato and Aristotle effectively reduces to a manmade-language based understanding of reality (it is no kind of quantitative, mathematical understanding of reality). Aristotle emphasized “substance” versus “accident”. The Pan Reference Dictionary of Philosophy says, “Accident 1. (in scholastic philosophy) … that which in itself has no independent or self-sufficient existence, but only inheres in a substance. This latter may remain in more or less fixed form, while ‘its’ accidents disappear or alter. 2. (in Aristotelian logic) … an inessential property, that which may be attributed to a substance without being essential to that substance. For instance, a girl may be blonde, but she must be female; blondeness in this example is an accident, femaleness is not. … Form: In Plato, to know the Form of X is to understand the nature of X; so the philosopher who, for example, grasps the Form of justice knows not merely what acts are just, but also why they are just. Similarly, Aristotle regards a form as that which makes something intelligible, and which (like Plato’s Forms) is grasped by the intellect.
However, Aristotle rejects Plato’s view that all forms are ‘separable’, that is have an independent existence. For Aristotle, what exist independently are substances, and substances (with a few important exceptions, such as God) consist of both matter and form. Matter is that which has form; for example, the human soul is the form of the human body, which is its matter. … In the case of the products of skill, form is imposed on matter [e.g. a sculptor molding clay]. But many forms, such as the form of the human body, are not imposed on matter in this way but are in a sense immanent. A form of this kind explains a thing’s development, it is the intelligible structure that a thing has when fully developed, and the growth of the thing is regarded as a striving to make actual its form. … When the scholastic philosophers spoke of ‘substantial forms’, they had in mind forms of this immanent kind. … forms were later deemed inconsistent with the mechanistic concepts of the new physics.” All that science does is get rid of the metaphysical forms of philosophy and replace them with mathematical formulae, yet it considers mathematics every bit as unreal as metaphysics. No marks for logical consistency. Wikipedia says, “For Aristotle, matter (hyle) is the undifferentiated primal element: it is rather that from which things develop than a thing in itself. The development of particular things from this germinal matter consists in differentiation, the acquiring of particular forms of which the knowable universe consists. The perfection of the form (morphe) of a thing is its entelechy in virtue of which it attains its fullest realization of function ... Thus the entelechy of the body is the soul. The origin of the differentiation process is to be sought in a prime mover, i.e. pure form entirely separate from all matter, eternal, unchangeable, operating not by its own activity but by the impulse which its own absolute existence excites in matter.” The Pan Reference Dictionary of Philosophy says, “One definition of substances makes use of the logical notions of subject and predicate; regarded in this way, S is a substance if S is a subject of predicates, but cannot be predicated in turn of any other subject. This concept of substance can be traced back to Aristotle, and plays an important part in the philosophy of Leibniz. … A substance of the kind just described is also said to be that which does not exist in a subject, where something is understood to ‘exist’ in a subject if it cannot exist separately from it. In this sense, then, a substance may be said to be that which has an independent existence. … Substance can also be regarded as ‘essence’, and some philosophers view the substance of a thing as what it really is, as opposed to the
way it appears … the essence is regarded as remaining the same, whereas the appearances change.” Descartes defined a substance as a thing that does not depend on anything else for its existence. Substance is therefore a self-subsisting thing. Strictly speaking, Descartes believed only in one substance – God. God, uniquely, did not depend on anything else. Leaving God out of it, Descartes accepted only two substances: mind (unextended, thinking substance) and matter (extended, unthinking substance). This dualism provided a marvelous clarity, but was quickly attacked as incoherent (since how could the two different substances coexist and interact, given that they had nothing in common?). It was soon replaced by the separate schools of materialism and idealism, and also rationalism and empiricism. Cartesian dualism can be fully explained in terms of ontological Fourier mathematics connecting unextended monadic minds (frequency domains) to the ex- tended spacetime domain of material bodies. For Thomas Aquinas, a human is constituted by a compound of matter and substantial form, while an angel is substantial form alone (angels, for Aquinas, have no matter). Christopher Hughes wrote, “An angel is formate but ‘immateriate’ .... substantial form is the principle of substantial esse. Hence it is not possible for anything to be a substance without having some substantial form or other, which is to say substantial formation is essential to any substance.” In ontological mathematics, the substantial form for all eternal monadic minds is the generalized Euler Formula. This substantial form underlies everything. At zero entropy, all eternal monadic minds are functionally identical, which is why they have no entropy. The zero-entropy collection of all eternal monadic minds is the being known as “God”. God constitutes the domain of Being, a whole, unitary, unchanging domain – of the nature of Aristotle’s self-thinking God. At non-zero-entropy, all monadic minds become individuated. Each then develops separately. This is the domain of Becoming – a fragmented, changing multiplicity, a domain of the temporal and contingent.
Reality is simply God in two modes: God united, and God divided. The substantial form of an eternal monadic mind allows for both Being (unity; love; reason) and Becoming (disunity; hate; unreason … or warped reason, to be more accurate). Wikipedia says, “Medieval philosophers who used Aristotelian concepts frequently distinguished between substantial forms and accidental forms. A substance necessarily possesses at least one substantial form. It may also possess a variety of accidental forms. For Aristotle, a ‘substance’ (ousia) is an individual thing – for example, an individual man or an individual horse. The substantial form of substance S consists of S’s essential properties, the properties that S’s matter needs in order to be the kind of substance that S is. In contrast, S’s accidental forms are S’s non-essential properties, properties that S can lose or gain without changing into a different kind of substance.” Aristotle sought to describe the world in terms of human language, cast in metaphysical terms. So, for example, Socrates would be described as having the substantial form of human, and accidental forms determining his height, weight, appearance, intelligence, personality, character, and so on. No reference is made in hylomorphism to mathematics or science. There is no quantitative aspect. It’s all qualitative. That’s why Aristotelian “science” never had a future. It was a word-based description of reality rather than number-based. It couldn’t deliver a measurable and predictable reality. It couldn’t reveal the inner workings and processes of things. It could only label the exterior and speculate about the interior. ✽✽✽ Why is science so successful? It’s because it combines empirical observation with rational mathematics. But that’s also exactly why it cannot understand ultimate reality. Ultimately reality, exactly as Plato said, is intelligible, not sensible. You have to address it via intellectual means, not sensory means. Empirical observation combined with mathematics leads to knowledge of the phenomenal world (which is all that scientists actually care about), but to no knowledge at all of noumenal reality, the Truth of existence. Thus science is stuck in the same position as Kantian philosophy: it cannot penetrate through to the core of things. Only ontological mathematics can. It is reality.
The Composite
Christina Van Dyke wrote, “Can the persistence of a human being’s soul at death and prior to the bodily resurrection be sufficient to guarantee that the resurrected human being is numerically identical to the human being who died? According to Thomas Aquinas, it can. Yet, given that Aquinas holds that the human being is identical to the composite of soul and body and ceases to exist at death, it’s difficult to see how he can maintain this view. ... According to Aquinas, a human being is not identical to her soul, but rather to the physical composite of soul and body. In fact, Aquinas holds that a human being is necessarily a composite of matter and form – a claim that commits him to the position that no human being could exist without a body.” Aquinas wrote, “The soul and the body are not two actually existing substances, but from these two things one actually existing substance is made.” Aquinas thus rejected the mind-body substance dualism later promoted by Descartes. If a human is an integral composite of an immaterial soul and a material body, then, if humans have to endure a period between death and resurrection where they don’t have a material body, do they still qualify as human? They seem to no longer match the definition. By contrast, an immaterial soul, not tied to any particular body, never suffers from this problem. It can also be other than a human (since it can connect to any kind of body). It can be anything! Resurrection means that you can never be anything other than a human, or a disembodied human. Reincarnation means that you are not restricted to human existence. You can instead go on a great evolutionary journey. Resurrection theology entails the problem of “gappy” existence, where the soul lacks a physical body before resurrection. Reincarnation has no such problem because the soul is not tied to a particular body. For Aquinas, the human soul is naturally united to a body. The essence of a human soul is to be the form of a body. This is not the case for angels. The soul, the form that defines the angel, has nothing to do with a body. In ontological mathematics, the soul is a monadic singularity. It is not tied to any body but it can link to a succession of bodies of every different species if it so desires.
Reincarnation entails a completely different reality and journey from resurrection. Resurrection implies Creationism (the creation of souls by a Creator), while reincarnation can reflect soul Eternalism, where souls are uncreated, have existed forever, and together constitute the Creator that makes everything. (Creationism can never reflect soul Eternalism, but it is not definitionally opposed to reincarnation. Indeed, many early Christians were reincarnationists, and, in some esoteric circles, the secret teachings of Christianity are all about reincarnation, not resurrection.) With resurrection, it is against the nature of the soul to exist without the body. This ought to refute resurrection since the soul has to exist without a body in the period between death and resurrection. Aquinas self-servingly argued that nothing that is contrary to nature can exist perpetually, but can, without defying nature, exist temporarily, so the human soul can endure without a body in the period between death and resurrection. Aquinas simply decrees that this is the case. He offers no explanation of why it should be the case. How can a temporary perversion of nature be any more likely than a permanent perversion of nature? It’s the perversion of nature that is the difficulty, not the duration. If someone said that a permanent miracle is unnatural, but a temporary miracle is natural, they have failed to address the elephant in the room: the miracle itself. If the miracle is impossible, its permanent or temporary nature is neither here nor there. Aquinas sets out to “prove” the reality of resurrection. He does not set out to question the reality of resurrection and find fault with the theory of resurrection. He begins with his conclusion – resurrection is true – then seeks arguments to justify his conclusion. He doesn’t seek any arguments that get in the way of his conclusion. Most people argue in the same way. Scientists, for example, start with the conclusion that materialism is true, and therefore all of their arguments are designed to support materialism. Never once do they consider that a more rational and logical position requires materialism to be false. Ironically, scientists claim to be influenced only by the “facts”, and the “evidence”. Actually, the only thing that influences scientists is their paradigm. All “facts” and “evidence” are interpreted strictly via the paradigm of materialism and empiricism. An idealist and rationalist would of course interpret the same “facts” and “evidence” in the opposite way.
The facts and evidence are not what is critical. The coherence of the paradigm, the conformance of the paradigm with reason and logic, is what counts. The paradigm of idealism and rationalism supports a coherent account of reality. The paradigm of materialism and empiricism does not. It supports a correspondent account of reality. Correspondence is intrinsically not coherent. As the name indicates, it’s designed to achieve correspondence with sensory observations, not to challenge the validity and coherence of sensory observations. “The earth is flat” is a correspondent claim … but it’s false. “The sun moves around the earth” is a correspondent claim … but it’s false. Why should any sensory observation whatsoever be accepted uncritically as true and not in requirement of radical reinterpretation and reframing? The scientific method begins with the injunction to observe. It certainly doesn’t begin with the admonition to doubt everything you observe because your senses may not be accurate determinants of what is going on, what is really there. Thousands of years ago, Lucretius, the Atomist, a fanatical materialist, said, “The eyes cannot know the nature of things.” Sadly, modern materialists appear to have forgotten this elementary truth. They believe that reality corresponds to what the eyes see. It doesn’t. The eyes are interpretive organs. What something is in itself, without eyes interpreting, or rather misinterpreting, it, is something that eyes can never tell you. This basic truth is ignored by 100% of scientists. In functional terms, they all believe in naïve realism. Wikipedia says, “In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism (also known as direct realism, perceptual realism, or common sense realism) is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are.” No scientist ever says, “The observations we conduct in science are much more complex than we naïvely imagine. They do not directly show us reality in some common sense way. Instead, we need to be cautious about every observation and question every naïve and common sense interpretation we apply to an observation.” Science, given that it stakes everything on observation, would cease to be science if it warned against straightforwardly accepting any observation. As soon as you place a question mark over observation, you have ceased to be a scientist. No matter what nonsense scientists spin to defend themselves, the plain fact is that they are all naïve
realists because that is the whole basis on which science is predicated. As soon as the naïve validity of observation is doubted, science is impossible. If you say that what we are observing is not necessarily what is there or what is true … or that what is really there – the thing in itself – may be radically different from what is observed, you have ceased to be a scientist. Science asserts that the best way to interrogate reality is via our senses, but if our senses are unreliable and even delusional then plainly our senses cannot be the best means to tell us about reality. Wikipedia says, “According to the naïve realist, the objects of perception are not merely representations of external objects, but are in fact those external objects themselves. The naïve realist is typically also a metaphysical realist, holding that these objects continue to obey the laws of physics and retain all of their properties regardless of whether or not there is anyone to observe them. They are composed of matter, occupy space, and have properties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and color, that are usually perceived correctly.” It’s impossible for science to be conducted in good faith on any basis other than this. If observation is treated in terms of representation – i.e. the observed objects are representations of the objects rather than the objects themselves – then the question becomes how do we access the objects themselves, as they are in themselves, before they are represented to us? That question brings science to an end, because science is always necessarily stuck at the level of representation. If what is represented – the phenomenon – is nothing like what is actually there – the noumenon – why would we place any trust in science when it comes to its claims concerning ultimate reality? At best, science can only ever be a useful, heuristic model of phenomenal reality, but cannot address noumenal, metaphysical reality at all. It has always been essential for science to deny the existence of any hidden, noumenal, metaphysical reality because, if such a reality existed, science would be revealed to be a hopeless way to interrogate what reality actually is. Ontological mathematics defines science for what it is: a heuristic, correspondent, representational modeling system that addresses phenomena only and gets nowhere nearly what existence actually is (noumenal reality). Noumenal reality comprises
sinusoidal waves, the true building blocks of existence, from which all material things are made. No scientific experiment can ever show what reality in itself is. Only reason and logic can access true reality. Reason and logic are eternal, and are enshrined in the eternal ontology of mathematics. The human senses are temporal and contingent and it’s a literal category error to imagine they can reveal anything at all about eternal and necessary reality to us. Scientists have never comprehended this simple, rational and logical fact, but science isn’t about reason and logic. These have no formal role in the scientific method. Science never invokes the PSR, Occam’s razor or eternal and necessary logic. Why not, you have to ask. What does it have against reason and logic? It has sensory confirmation bias against them! Scientists are sensing types. No one who is not a sensing type falls for scientism.
The Oak Tree and the Resurrected Body If, after an oak tree “A” is cut down, another oak tree “B” grows in exactly the same place, A and B are said to be numerically distinct, even if they happen to be qualitatively identical. If, as a result of death, a soul loses its body (corresponding to Tree A) and then gets a new body as a result of resurrection (corresponding to Tree B), are the two bodies actually the same, are they continuous, are they qualitatively identical? In fact, the resurrected body is a glory body with radically different properties from the mortal body, so can they even be considered the same body either quantitatively or qualitatively or numerically, or in any way at all? Resurrection seems to be a giant fraud. You certainly don’t come back as the same person you were before your death, so in what way are you the same person? Remember that Christianity says that your soul is tied to a specific body, but, really, it’s only tied to a specific appearance, meaning that people who know you would know it was you if you appeared in front of them. But appearance isn’t substance. The body of a person is wholly different after resurrection, even if it resembles the person, so in what way is it really the same person? Imagine a transhumanist project that uploaded a dying person’s consciousness to a wondrous new android body with superpowers (relative to a normal human body). Is the person still the same? If we are defined by our relationship with a specific body and then that specific body undergoes revolutionary changes that make it nothing like its
former nature, except it retains a similar appearance, how can we truly be said to be the same person? Consider the ship of Theseus. Wikipedia says, “In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. Plutarch wrote, “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.” If the wooden ship had every wooden plank replaced by steel, would anyone say it was the same ship? If the resurrection body has every part replaced by a “glory” part, is it the same body? In a reincarnational worldview, the body is simply a vehicle, an avatar, a vessel, with which the eternal mind (soul) can interact with the temporal world. The eternal mind has no permanent relationship to a particular body. Resurrection, by contrast, is defined by the soul’s relationship to a fixed body, but if the body isn’t actually fixed at all, except at the level of superficial appearance, isn’t this a con? It breaks its own rules. Christian resurrection would seem to be fully compatible with the atheistic transhumanist project, but that’s a fundamental contradiction in terms. Imagine that a dead person’s consciousness was recorded at death, and stored on a disk. Imagine that ten years later, this consciousness was uploaded to a superhuman android body built to superficially resemble the person’s former appearance. In what way would that be substantively different from Christian resurrection? Yet no one needs Christ in transhumanism. Christianity in these terms is just a disguised version of materialism. Transhumanism it not reincarnational. It has no connection to eternal souls that link to one avatar after another in succession. In Objections Against the Resurrection, Aquinas (intending to refute the objections) actually highlighted several telling points. He said, “There are, of course, some things which seem to be opposed to faith in the resurrection. Thus: in no natural thing does one find that which has been corrupted returning to being with numerical identity; neither does it seem possible to go back again from privation of a thing to possessing it.
Accordingly, since things which are corrupted cannot be repeated with an identity in number, nature intends that the thing which is corrupted be preserved with an identity in species by generation. Since, then, man is corrupted by death, and the very body of man resolved even into the primary elements, it does not seem possible for a man with identity in number to be restored to life.” This is a perfectly valid argument. It’s even more powerful today. A human body is defined by its DNA. Once the DNA has been destroyed by death, how would you then get the DNA back, except by divine intervention (i.e. miracle)? Invoking miracles hardly constitutes serious philosophy or science. Aquinas wrote, “Again, numerical identity is impossible to a thing if one of its essential principles cannot be numerically identical, for, if an essential principle is varied, that essence of the thing is varied by which the thing, as it is, is also one.” If you radically change the properties of a body – as happens in resurrection, where a limited, mortal body is replaced by a glorious immortal body with special powers – in what way is the person still the same person? If you went to bed as you and woke up as someone with the powers of Thor, your life from then on would be absolutely different, and you would be absolutely different too. Your whole worldview would be transformed beyond recognition. Aquinas wrote, “But what is returned altogether to nothingness cannot be taken up again with numerical identity; this will be the creation of a new thing rather than the restoration of an identical thing.” That’s correct. Once a physical body’s gone, it’s gone. There’s no way back to that body once it has died. Aquinas wrote, “But there seem to be several of the essential principles of man returning to nothingness by his death. And first, to be sure, his very corporeity and the form of the compound, since the body is manifestly dissolved. Then, too, a part of the sensitive soul, and the nutritive, which cannot he without bodily organs, seem lost. Further, of course, there seems to return to nothingness the humanity itself – which is said to be the form of the whole – once the soul is separated from the body. It seems, then, impossible that man should rise again being identical in number.” These are all striking points, and Aquinas, by repeating them, shows that he’s well aware of them, so it’s all the greater mystery that he rejects them in favor of his bizarre Christian beliefs.
Aquinas wrote, “Furthermore, what is not continuous seems not to he numerically identical.” This is correct, but Christians of course have to insist that the dead person and the resurrected person are one and the same, even though there is no continuity of the body between death and resurrection. Indeed the physical body turns to entropic dust and is dispersed everywhere. Aquinas wrote, “Now, clearly, man’s being is taken away by death, since corruption is a change from being to non-being. It is, then, impossible that man’s being be repeated with numerical identity. Then, neither will the man be the same in number, for things which are the same in number are the same in being.” Yup, right again! These are all excellent objections to resurrection! Aquinas went on, “If, furthermore, a man’s identical body is restored to life, by equal reasoning whatever was in the man’s body ought to be returned to the same man. But on this something extremely unseemly follows – not only by reason of the beard and the nails and the hair which are openly removed by daily trimming, but also by reason of other parts of the body which are covertly resolved by the action of the natural heat – and if these all are restored to the man rising again, an unseemly enormity will rise with him. It seems, then, that man will not rise after death.” The idea here is how it is known what to resurrect? Will all your nail trimmings, beard trimmings, haircuts, and all the skin that flaked off you all come back? Aquinas wrote, “…that which is common to all those existing in a species seems to be natural to that species. But the resurrection of man is not natural, for there is not a natural power of man which suffices to do this. Therefore, not all men will rise in common.” Since no natural process is invoked in the process of resurrection (it’s a divine miracle), there’s no intrinsic reason why all men will rise in common. It’s up to God’s whim, and which mortal knows the whims of God? Aquinas wrote, “Furthermore, if by Christ we are freed from fault and from death, which is the effect of sin, it seems that those alone ought to be freed who had a share in the mysteries of Christ by which they would be freed from sin. But this is not true of all men. Therefore, not all men will rise, it seems.”
The argument here is that if resurrection is real, only Christians should be resurrected. What’s the point of resurrecting – by divine miracle – all non-Christians (the damned)? Their fate is to be sent to hell forever for not believing in Christ. So, Christ resurrects all non-Christians in order to torture them! If he didn’t resurrect them, they wouldn’t be tortured forever in hell. This seems like the purest sadism and psychopathy, not the action of a loving, compassionate, forgiving God. Aquinas then has to address the objections to resurrection which he has just raised. The idea is that he’s giving his followers a playbook with which to confound the typical arguments raised against his theology. To be fair, we do the same in the context of ontological mathematics. We mention the arguments deployed against ontological mathematics and then show how false and stupid they are. (We have never encountered anything other than total ignorance of our position.) Aquinas wrote, “Now, toward a solution of these difficulties this consideration is required: God, when He established human nature, granted the human body something over and above that which was its due in its natural principles: a kind of incorruptibility, namely, by which it was suitably adapted to its form, with the result that, as the life of the soul is perpetual, so the body could live perpetually by the soul.” Aquinas is basically saying that natural arguments cannot be deployed against a supernatural system, operating by the almighty power of God – hardly an argument any rationalist would seek to defend. You can’t argue against real objections by invoking divine miracles. Aquinas wrote, “And this sort of incorruptibility, although not, of course, natural in its active principle, was somehow natural in its order to the end; namely, as matter would be ordered to its natural form, which is the end of the matter.” Again, Aquinas is trying to argue against specific, legitimate objections by moving the goalposts. He says in effect that the very valid objections raised against resurrection are false because God’s will trumps everything! In other words, you already have to share Aquinas’s faith before you can accept his “answers”. You already need to have accepted his conclusion to find him persuasive. He’s appealing to his audience’s partisan faith, not to reason and logic. Exactly the same considerations apply to scientific materialist dogma. You cannot accept much of what science says unless you have total, uncritical faith in materialism.
If you question materialism, much of science starts to look ridiculous – based on a wholly false premise. Aquinas said, “When the soul, then, outside the order of its nature, was turned away from God, that disposition was lost which had been divinely bestowed on the soul’s body to make it proportionally responsive to the soul; and death followed. Death, therefore, is something added as an accident, so to say, to man through sin, if one considers the establishment of human nature.” By this argument, the Fall of Man changed the nature of man. God added the “accident” of death to humanity. But this means that resurrection too must be an “accident” since resurrection is only relevant if people die, hence resurrection is certainly not inherent to the nature of humanity. It’s added on, just as death is. It’s “unnatural”, so to speak. It was never in the original design. The original design for Adam and Eve was that they were created perfectly, i.e. they were naturally equipped with their perfect “glory” bodies, which were never intended to degrade or die. Adam and Eve, we must suppose, had exactly the same powers that Jesus Christ enjoyed upon resurrection given that, when they were in Eden, they too had glorified (glory) bodies. They don’t teach you that in theology class, do they?! Adam and Eve had their glory bodies removed from them when they were banished from Eden, and these bodies were then replaced by mortal bodies, subject to death, which were then in need of future resurrection. God the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator had to change his design for humanity. What happened to his divine foreknowledge? He didn’t see that coming, did he, or he would never have had to changes his design template! Aquinas wrote, “But this accident was taken away by Christ, who by the merit of His passion our ‘death by dying did destroy.’ From this, then, it follows that by the divine power which gave the body incorruption the body may once again be restored from death to life.” This argument is utterly false. God didn’t take away the accident, i.e. restore things to how they were in Eden where death was impossible. Rather, he added a second accident – resurrection – to reverse the effects of the first accident (death), but it worked properly only for those who believed in Christ. For everyone else, they were resurrected only so that Christ could pronounce his judgment on them and dispatch them to hell. Gee, thanks! Motherfucker! (Literally!)
Aquinas wrote, “Granted, then, that the operation of nature cannot bring it about that a corrupted body be restored to life, the divine power can bring it about.” Aquinas basically says that all natural arguments can be dismissed out of hand because anything that nature can’t do, God can! That’s not philosophy, that’s religious dogmatism. Aquinas wrote, “Hence, by nature’s operation, what was corrupted cannot be restored with a numerical identity. But the divine power which produced things in being operates by nature in such wise that it can without nature produce natures effect, as was previously shown. Hence since the divine power remains the same even when things are corrupted, it can restore the corrupted to integrity.” Aquinas gives the same tiresome argument over and over again. He says in effect that no natural argument can ever prevail … because God can do whatever he likes. That’s not any kind of intellectualism. That’s pure faith. Aquinas wrote, “For it is not necessary that whatever has been in man materially rise in him; further, if something is lacking, it can be supplied by the power of God.” The “power of God” vanquishes all counter-arguments! Aquinas wrote, “Resurrection is natural if one considers its purpose, for it is natural that the soul be united to the body. But the principle of resurrection is not natural. It is caused by the divine power alone.” Resurrection could never be natural if humans were intended to be deathless. God at first introduced death (something wholly unnatural given the original definition of a deathless human), and all humans were subjected to it, as per the doctrine of Original Sin. After the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, resurrection became available, indeed compulsory, for all of humanity – but all non-Christian resurrectees were to be resurrected only to be condemned immediately to hell! Aquinas wrote, “Nor must one deny that there will be a resurrection of all, although not all cleave to Christ by faith, and are not imbued with His mysteries. For the Son of God assumed human nature to restore it. Therefore, what is a defect of nature will be restored in all, and so all will return from death to life. But the failure of the person will not be restored except in those who have adhered to Christ; either by their own act, believing in Him; or at least through the sacrament of faith.”
Jesus Christ … the God who died so that he could resurrect you and send you to hell, unless you slavishly worshipped him. Fuck you, you monster! We shall not serve! Thankfully, Christianity and resurrection are absolute nonsense and lies. No one has anything to fear! Frankly, to be a Christian, you’d need to be sick in the head. You’d need to be a sadist or psychopath. Sadly, they all are!
Leibniz and Substantial Forms “At first, when I had freed myself from the yoke of Aristotle, I had believed in the void and atoms, for it is this which best satisfies the imagination. But returning to this view after much meditation, I perceived that it is impossible to find the principles of a true unity in matter alone, or in what is merely passive, since everything in it is but a collection or accumulation of parts ad infinitum. … To find these real unities, therefore, I was forced to have recourse to a formal atom, since a material being cannot be at the same time material and perfectly indivisible, or endowed with true unity. It was thus necessary to restore and as it were, to rehabilitate, the substantial forms which are in such disrepute today, but in a way which makes them intelligible and separates their proper use from their previous abuse. I found then that their nature consists of force and that there follows from this something analogous to sense and appetite, so that we must think of them in terms similar to the concept which we have of souls.” – Leibniz You cannot take passive, lifeless, mindless things and make human beings from them, or any life at all. It’s impossible. Life and mind are incompatible with materialism, and it’s a category error to believe that matter is the basis of the human race. No scientist has ever advanced even one argument to account for how lifeless things produce life, and mindless things produce mind. Leibniz’s idea of formal atoms is far superior to science’s notion of material atoms. What is the critical factor missing in material atoms? It’s any agency, any interiority, any will, any meaning, any purpose, any point. When you replace material atoms with formal atoms, you get monads. Monads are Life Atoms. Monads are Mind Atoms. All monads are pursuing a teleology. All monads are striving entelechies. Material atoms are grounded in something else, i.e. in mental atoms (monads). Material atoms are the constructs of mental atoms.
Matter atoms don’t produce minds. Mind atoms produce matter. How can anyone expect science to explain existence if it has literally inverted reality? Matter does not precede mind. Mind constructs matter. Mind causes matter. The Big Bang was when the Cosmic Mind – the immaterial Singularity, the array of all monadic minds – created the spacetime universe of matter. Science has no clue what preceded the physical universe. Only one thing can precede matter … mind. Only one thing can precede science … mathematics. What certainly doesn’t precede matter is magic, miracle, randomness … the inexplicable. The most remarkable thing of all about scientists is how much they despise mind and mathematics. They are determined to reduce mind to an illusion, a total unreality, and they are equally determined to relegate mathematics to nothing but a meaningless, unreal, manmade abstraction. Assigning an ontology to mathematics would end science. Science is a system predicated on the reality of Aristotelian prime matter (which Aristotle thought was formally unreal … it was pure potential), and the denial of the existence of Aristotle’s God (pure form, pure mind, pure actuality). Ontological mathematics does the exact opposite. The only reality is pure formula. Everything is a product of the generalized Euler Formula, the God Equation. Prime matter is reduced to what it was originally – a potentiality, not a real thing. The Big Bang is what starts to release the potentiality of matter. Before the Big Bang, there were no material atoms (the atoms upon which science is based). There were atoms, though. These were mind atoms (monads): form atoms rather than matter atoms. Each form atom (monad) contains a full collection of basis content, but it takes the Big Bang to convert this basis content into scientific content. What is science’s basic picture of reality? It’s that Aristotelian prime matter randomly exploded out of non-existence. Everything is prime matter. Aristotelian Form does not exist. What is ontological mathematics’ basic picture? It’s that Aristotelian Form – as pure monadic mathematics; living, thinking, purposeful reality – is the intelligible, syntactic, rational aspect of existence. It’s tied to “prime content”, the semantic, empirical aspect
of existence. The Big Bang releases its semantic potential as the material, phenomenal, empirical, constructed universe, but all of it is underpinned by mathematical syntactic form, which is precisely why all scientific laws are mathematical laws. Mathematics in its syntactic aspect is the form of existence. Mathematics in its semantic aspect is the content of existence. Science hasn’t escaped from the ancient Greek form and matter depiction of reality. All it has done is emphasize the matter aspect to the exclusion of all else, and relegated the form aspect to external mathematical laws. All interior forms (mind, internal agency, inner will, inner drive, internal teleology) are banished. Is there anyone in science with enough philosophical literacy to understand what’s going on? You must be joking. Scientists are wholly ignorant of philosophy and where science stands in the intellectual stream. It would totally transform science if scientists actually understood where scientific concepts originated, in what intellectual context, and in response to what opposition. What does ontological mathematics accomplish? It restores the Aristotelian worldview, except Aristotle’s “God” now becomes the collection of all monadic minds, and these monadic minds are, between them, the collective substantial form for the material universe. Meanwhile, individual monads are the individual substantial forms that inform all life: plant, animal, human and higher. Material bodies are the avatars controlled by monadic souls. Substantial forms are central to the Aristotelian worldview. They are exactly what is lacking from scientific materialism. However, they need to be recast as mathematical monadic minds, bearing the Source Formula of existence, the generalized Euler Formula. Aristotle’s system, cast in metaphysical terms, was incompatible with serious science. Ontological mathematics, by contrast, makes Aristotle’s system entirely compatible with science by bringing to bear the central equation of analytic mathematics – Euler’s Formula – on Aristotle’s substantive forms. According to Aristotelian hylomorphism, all natural material substances consist of matter and a teleological organizing principle called “form.” These forms account for the substance’s existence or actuality. They make the substance the kind of thing that it
is, and specify the properties, activities, and powers that are proper to a substance of that kind. In ontological mathematics, all objects are grounded in the universal substantial form – the generalized Euler Formula that defines each monadic mind. Everything is just a variation on the same theme: everything is grounded in the same substantial form, the same mathematical formula. Descartes, the first modern philosopher, and science both denounced the use of substantial forms, and replaced them with the mechanistic view of the world. Leibniz duly realized that it was essential to rehabilitate substantial forms, as monads. Monadic minds offer a completely different model of causation from mechanical causes. They turn the world into a living organism rather than a dead machine. To have living things, you must posit substantial forms (souls). A substantial form is the principle of the unity of a living body. You do not make something alive by combining lifeless atoms. You make a material body alive by connecting it to a monadic substantial form. Your monadic soul is the substantial form of your otherwise merely aggregate body. Without its link to your monadic mind, your body reverts to the dust it always was. Scientists ludicrously believe that dead atoms produce life when you organize them “just right”. They don’t. The living agent that controls a body isn’t in the body at all, and it isn’t material. It’s an immaterial, mental singularity … a monadic mind, a formal atom. A mere chunk of stuff, such as a rock, is inert because it has no individual controlling monad, it has no living agent connected to it. Leibniz distinguished six types of monads: God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and matter. (In Leibniz’s system, something like a rock was made of countless “bare” monads – monads unable to express thought, and with no controlling monad to convert them into a living, striving system.) One error Leibniz made in his published work was to neglect to refer to the monads acting as a collective. Instead, he made all monads subject to the God Monad, which
placed them all in designed harmony, rather than allowing the monads to achieve harmony freely, in their own way.
Unity “I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.” – Leibniz Ultimate reality is based on a zero-entropy Universal Hive Mind, aka “God”. In this Hive Mind, all of its nodes (each node is an eternal monadic mind) are in perfect harmony and unity. Ultimate reality is unchanging Being, the eternal and necessary order. It never departs from zero entropy. However, the mathematics of reality creates a second domain, that of Becoming, the temporal and contingent order. Becoming is an infinitely repeating unit within Being, just as a sinusoidal wave is an infinitely repeating unit within a circle. The circle is Being; the wave is Becoming. You cannot get the one without the other. Being concerns completed sinusoidal waves. Becoming concerns sinusoidal waves in progress (incomplete sinusoidal waves). Either way, the whole of reality concerns sinusoidal waves. There is nothing else. Basis sinusoids, the sinusoids of Being, are not free floating. They are organized into autonomous, eternal and necessary units called monads. These are eternal minds. Eternal sinusoidal monadic minds are the basis units of reality. These same minds are the source of all Becoming. Being and Becoming are both essential to all monadic minds. Science rejects Being (the eternal and necessary) and tries to explain everything via Becoming (the temporal and contingent), an impossible task that degenerates into an appeal to infinite regress, or randomness.
Causation According to Aristotle, there are four causes behind all the change in the world: 1) the material cause (determined by the matter that composes the changing thing), 2) the formal cause (what gives the matter its particular form and provides an internal drive for change), the efficient cause (an agent separate from the thing being changed, which
interacts with it so as to be the immediate and direct agent of external change), and the final cause (that for the sake of which a thing is changing; the purpose of the change). Material Cause – the stuff out of which something is made. Formal Cause – the defining characteristics of the thing. Final Cause – the purpose of the thing. Efficient Cause – the antecedent condition or agent that brought the thing about. Early modern science, starting in the 17th century and lasting until the second half of the 19th century, got rid of the material and formal causes, and, especially, the final cause (the teleological cause), leaving just the immediate (efficient) cause, envisaged in mechanical terms, and usually as one thing colliding with, or coming into direct contact with, another thing, causing the second thing to undergo a change. Newtonian gravity was condemned as “occult” because it caused change without any direct contact, operating instantaneously across empty space. How could it change anything without touching it? Modern
science,
supplemented
starting
in
the
second
half
of
the
19th
century,
mechanical, direct, efficient causation, with field-based efficient
causation acting at a distance, and also random, probabilistic, efficient causation, which isn’t in fact causation at all since there is no reason for the change … change occurs at random,
without
any
determining
antecedent
conditions.
Modern
science
thus subscribes to an untenable causation dualism, whereby some things happen via definite agents, and other things via no agents at all: they happen randomly, without reason. Science cannot give any rational cause for the creation of the immanent universe of spacetime and matter. It claims this happened randomly, spontaneously, that existence erupted out of non-existence for no reason, via no mechanism, to no end. This has been described as science’s “one free miracle” to get everything going. Of course, in any rational system, there are no miracles. Miracles are strictly prohibited. If you don’t have a reason for something, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about and your whole system is bogus.
Appealing to randomness to get things started is even less rational than appealing to the Christian God. Catholic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas at least attempted a rational defense and proof of the existence of the Christian God. No one can justify randomness. It’s not an explanation, it’s the absence of an explanation. It’s invoked in sheer desperation, to avoid calling on any of the alternatives that would automatically challenge the legitimacy of science, such as God, metaphysics, or ontological mathematics. No rational person could ever defend scientific materialism. Of course, science wasn’t thought up by rationalists. It was the construct of empiricists, the historical foes of rationalism. Any scientist who says he’s on the side of reason and logic is a comedian. Science is empiricism, not rationalism. It is not informed by rational and logical principles. It is driven by sensory experience. An immanent (contingent, temporal, spatial and material) universe cannot explain itself. What existed before the temporal order began, before space existed, before matter existed? Science says nothing at all existed. The immanent universe, science claims, randomly jumped out of non-existence, a fundamental breach of the laws of logic and any coherent account of the law of conservation of energy (an eternal and necessary law, not a temporal and contingent law). Science, despite its propaganda, does not accept the law of conservation of energy. Rationally, the law of conservation of energy can be expressed only in eternal and necessary terms, but science rejects any eternal and necessary order, since such an order is non-scientific. Science is about a posteriori induction based on observation, and it rejects a priori deduction, which can be conducted wholly without observation. Science subscribes to a temporal and contingent law of energy conservation, and even then only very approximately, thanks to quantum mechanical “uncertainty”. Science says that there was no energy (non-existence), and then, randomly, there was energy (the immanent universe came into existence), but this universe had an overall value of zero, i.e. it had a negative energy component that balanced the positive energy component, meaning that no non-zero net energy had been created, so no conservation of energy was violated. Ta da! No reference is made to eternal and necessary energy conservation, whereby energy (existence) can never under any circumstances be plucked from non-existence.
In ontological mathematics, the decisive criterion of no non-zero net energy ever being created is cast in eternal and necessary terms rather than temporal and contingent terms, i.e. all the energy in the universe has always existed. There was never any period of “non-existence” when no energy existed. Science conjures energy out of thin air, out of non-existence, but insists it has done nothing wrong as long as no non-zero net energy is created. The clash between eternal and necessary considerations and temporal and contingent considerations defines the difference between ontological mathematics and scientific materialism. Eternal and necessary conditions are analytic and a priori. They are analyzed via mathematics. Temporal and contingent conditions are synthetic and a posteriori. They are analyzed via science (and science’s bastardized version of mathematics, designed to conform to empiricism). In ontological mathematics, it’s not randomness that generates the immanent scientific universe. It’s the exact opposite. It’s the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which exists as ontological mathematics. Transcendent mathematics precedes and causes immanent science. If you remove all space, all time, all matter, you don’t end up with non-existence (subject to some illogical random capacity to generate existence), you end up with mathematics in itself! Mathematics in itself is pure mind! The material universe of science is created by the mental, transcendent domain of mathematics – an immaterial Singularity, outside space and time, completely free of matter. This is pure thought, and pure thought is made of eternal and necessary sinusoidal basis waves, each of which nets to exactly zero, and so the whole collection of which has a net energy of exactly zero. This is eternal and necessary energy. It always exists, yet it is always net zero. This is a strict requirement of the PSR and Occam’s razor. Energy exists eternally exactly because it is infinitely stable “nothing”. Nothing can prevent its existence, and that means it has always existed. Sinusoids with net-zero energy never come into existence and never go out of existence. They are around forever. They are pure Being, and pure Being is mental, not physical. Pure Being is zero. It’s unobservable. It’s not scientific. It’s pure math.
According to scientific materialism, basis energy – which is not defined in science – can randomly jump into existence out of non-existence, a logical impossibility in any rationalist system but not in an empiricist system. Some scientists speculate that “strings” are the lowest level of energy and matter, but these are not imagined to exist forever, hence they are non-analytic. They are not Being, they are Becoming. Since these strings have no necessary basis, there is nothing to prevent them from disappearing just as easily and randomly as they appeared. There’s nothing to stop it, no rational and logical law (since there are no laws at all in systems predicated on things happening for no reason, which is the formal definition of Chaos). No scientist appears to have asked the simple question of why, if the universe can randomly appear from nothing at all, then, by exactly the same considerations, it can’t simply randomly disappear into nothing at all too? There’s nothing in science to prevent this, but it’s explicitly prohibited in the eternal and necessary order of ontological, transcendent mathematics. There is no causal closure in science’s randomist ideology. Randomness introduces limitless open-endedness. Anything can happen, including the creation of infinite universes from nothing at all! And their disappearance. All manner of essential rational and logical factors – without which science can never be coherent – are excluded from science because of its temporal and contingent, synthetic a posteriori paradigm based on observation. Above all, science despises the transcendent, a priori order, which it associates with “God”, hence is deemed religious and metaphysical and thus anti-scientific. “God” is actually mathematics. Mathematics exists as a living, thinking organism – a Cosmic Hive Mind, made of individual nodes, which are autonomous mathematical, monadic minds. There is no Christian, theistic Creator God. God is an intricate mathematical system that has a unitary profile at zero entropy and splits into its parts at above zero-entropy. God is an ontological mathematical system of minds, whose properties depend on its entropy, not a theistic unitary being who can create the universe out of non-existence.
God at high entropy is the Devil, devoted to extreme individualism and competition: the war of all against all. As God’s entropy approaches zero, God becomes much more cooperative and harmonious. Once you grasp that mathematics is the completely rational and logical basis of all religion, spirituality and metaphysics, there is no longer any reason to flee from religion. Mathematics renders religion, spirituality, metaphysics and mind completely compatible with science. Why can’t science explain free will? It’s because science is an immanent system. In such a system, everything is the permanent prisoner of everything else. Nothing has any scope to be free. Think of the human body as a collection of atoms obeying the laws of physics (from which autonomous freedom of action is totally absent; from which subjectivity, hence subjective agency, is totally absent). Where in such a system can you identify any subjective agent capable of exercising freedom? It’s literally impossible for any such agent to exist in such a system. How does ontological mathematics cure this otherwise intractable problem? Ontological mathematics, unlike science, is based on minds (monads; agents; subjects; striving, teleological entities). These are transcendent, immaterial, nonempirical singularities outside space and time, hence are immune to the immanent web in which all immanent things are permanently trapped. Your body is an immanent object, subject externally to nothing but immanent, efficient causation. However, your body is actually controlled from the inside by a transcendent monadic soul, a substantial form, a mathematical singularity. So, your body is actually subjected to two types of causation: immanent, from the external environment, and transcendent, from the internal environment (your mind, your soul, your subjectivity). If you want to raise your arm, you don’t hope for a miracle that the external environment will somehow act on your arm and cause it to lift up. Instead, you internally will it. From the inside, using your own subjective agency, will and mathematical functionality, you send the instructions to your body to cause your arm to rise. You place no reliance on the external environment. Your choice has nothing to do with the external environment. You, as a transcendent mathematical agent,
are able, via ontological mathematics (which connects the transcendent domain of frequency singularities to the immanent domain of spacetime bodies), to instruct your spacetime body to enact your will. It’s not that different from the pilot of a military drone, based in the USA, being able to control a predator drone over Afghanistan, thousands of miles away, using remote control. In
reality,
we
live
in
an
ontological
mathematical
system
whereby
transcendent frequency singularities (eternal minds = souls) can communicate with immanent spacetime bodies via the ontological Fourier mathematics built into reality. We do not inhabit a local spacetime universe, as science claims. We inhabit a local spacetime universe with our bodies, but our minds are non-local singularities which exist in an immaterial Cosmic Hive Mind outside spacetime. It is this Cosmic Mind, linked to the immanent universe via ontological Fourier mathematical protocols built into the fiber and fabric of existence, which is responsible for the entire complexion of existence, why it is as it is. Scientific materialism, catastrophically, paradigmatically denies the existence of the transcendent Cosmic Mind and that is exactly why science cannot explain mind, life, free will, subjectivity, consciousness, the unconscious, qualia, teleology, meaning, the Source of the physical universe, and the point of everything. Science appeals instead to randomness, indeterminism, acausation, indeterminacy, emergentism, probabilism, statistics, the Multiverse, chance, accident, and so on – everything necessary to support a dogmatic, ideological, atheistic, nihilistic, empiricist, materialist worldview where existence randomly comes from non-existence and has no meaning, purpose, or point, and no sufficient reason to exist in the first place. Science is a crazy system. You would need to be irrational and illogical to accept scientific materialism over ontological mathematics. Science’s explanation of reality is worse than that of mainstream religion, and that’s saying something. Science gets only one thing right – it uses mathematics, which happens to be the true basis of reality! Without mathematics, science would be the silliest, worst religion of them all. Ontological mathematical causation can be described in the following terms: Science has no clue how reality actually operates because it has no idea of transcendence, hence
of immaterial mind. It cannot accommodate transcendent singularities in its worldview, and that’s why it fails. Science connects itself to “reality” via observation. That’s its cardinal error right there. The transcendent order that creates the immanent order isn’t observable, and so it is ideologically rejected by science. Science dogmatically dismisses the truth because the truth isn’t sensory. In fact, the truth is rational and logical, hence fully accessible to reason and logic. The Truth of existence is pure math, but science rejects pure math and accepts only the incomplete and inconsistent subset of mathematics compatible with sensory empiricism. Science is quite simply the wrong paradigm for understanding reality. The sole reason why it seems to work is that it uses mathematics, which is the right paradigm for understanding reality. Science is a manmade misinterpretation superimposed over mathematics, reflecting the fallacious manmade ideology of materialism, empiricism, localism, immanence, induction, the synthetic a posteriori, and the temporal and contingent. In ontological mathematics, transcendent monadic causation takes the role of Aristotelian formal causation, efficient causation and final causation. Consider the example of the strong wind blowing you off your feet. The strong wind is a material, immanent, external force. In Aristotelian terms, we might say that it reflects Aristotelian material and efficient causation. We could even argue that it reflects Aristotelian form. The wind has a characteristic mode of operation, making wind what it is. It definitely does not reflect Aristotelian final causation. It has no end, no purpose, when it blows. That’s just what it does as its nature. But now imagine you grab hold of something to stop yourself being blown off your feet. You are subject to your internal formal cause – your mind, your soul. As the efficient cause, it instructs your body to grab hold of something secure. At the same time, it is obeying a final cause: it has the purpose of stopping you from being blown over. Purpose doesn’t feature in science. It does in ontological mathematics, where it is supplied
by
monadic
minds
ends, objectives).
We Shall Not Be Moved
(formal
causes),
obeying
teleology
(purposes,
Aristotle’s Prime Mover causes change without interacting with what it is changing. It remains permanently unchanged and unmoved. Being causes Becoming without ever being changed by it.
Being and Becoming In the domain of Being (the basis Singularity with zero entropy), nothing ever changes. The domain of Being comprises immutable, eternal, necessary, sinusoidal basis waves. These are the entities that convey the law of conservation of energy. They are the basis for everything else. The eternal and necessary domain of Being necessarily gives rise to a second, derived domain … the temporal and contingent domain of Becoming, the domain where everything is always changing. Aristotle argued that everything within the empirical realm is in a constant state of actuality (what it is right now) versus potentiality (what it could be later). In the rational domain of Being, everything is in a constant state of actuality, and has no potentiality (nothing ever changes). Aristotle defined this state as God. Aristotle tried to work out the relationship between the transcendent domain of Being that never changes and the immanent domain of Becoming that is always changing. His answer was the Prime Mover, the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause, which was responsible for all change, but never changed itself. Aristotle didn’t quite get the right answer. Being and Becoming aren’t two separate domains. Rather, Becoming is a modality of Being. Becoming is made from Being. In ancient Greek Atomism, there are two eternal things: atoms and void. These would constitute the domain of unchanging Being. These ingredients never alter. However, the immutable atoms are always on the move within the immutable void, creating mutable combinations of atoms. These mutable combinations constitute the domain of Becoming. In ontological mathematics, the eternal things are the sinusoidal basis waves, and the temporal things are the combinations into which they enter.
For Aristotle, the domain of Being was God. Aristotle’s God did not interact with the world at all. It had no relationship with it. Although it knew nothing of the universe and ignored the universe, the universe craved to get close to it. This craving was the source of all motion and change. This is a romantic idea rather than serious philosophy. Craving can never constitute a rational explanation for motion. The Atomists had the eternal atoms as the direct cause of the changing domain, via their motion and their temporal, contingent combinations. In ontological mathematics, eternal basis waves are the direct cause of the changing domain, via the properties of the wavefunctions made from the basis waves. For Aristotle, God – pure form – had nothing to do with the changing domain, yet it changed for his sake, to get close to him. For Aristotle, God is pure actuality and thought. In ontological mathematics, the mental Singularity of basis waves is also pure actuality and thought, yet, by combining basis thoughts, it creates the changing world of matter, with which monadic minds then interact and undergo mental change as a result. So, a monadic mind is at one level always a pure, unchanging domain of Being, and, at another level, it is always a changing domain of thinking (produced by allowing the eternal and necessary basis waves to enter into temporal and contingent combinations). In the monadic system, four domains can be said to exist: A domain of Becoming is a material world with which a mind interacts. Think of a dream. One mind creates a subjective dreamworld and interacts with it. All minds together create an objective dreamworld and interact with it. Groups of minds can create part-objective/part-subjective worlds. They are more objective than one mind’s dreamworld, and less objective than the world created by all minds. To explain the Unmoved Mover, Aristotle used the analogy of the lover and the beloved. The lover wants to be with the beloved, but the beloved, in this case, does not even know who the lover is, and is completely unaffected. Aristotle’s Prime Mover naturally draws objects to it but it is not aware of them, so can’t be changed by them. It causes their attraction to it without being involved, and this unrequited attraction then creates all motion, change and teleology.
In practically all idealist systems, reality has a purpose, an end (the telos) which it is trying to accomplish. Schopenhauer’s system is the exception. He dismissed existence as blind will, as meaningless, pointless striving leading to nothing and nowhere. Schopenhauer despised Hegel because Hegel’s idealism was relentlessly closing in on the Absolute, the answer to existence. Dialectical materialism supported the notion of the material world reaching an Omega Point, that of universal Communism and the most highly evolved minds. Scientific materialism, by complete contrast, says that existence is totally purposeless, meaningless and pointless. There can be no question that scientists are extreme sensing types. You would have to be to choose to render your existence devoid of value when there are more rational and logical systems that confer supreme value on you. An extreme sensing person finds it easy to consider himself a robot, a mere collection of atoms with no free will, and that’s because he is so alienated from his own mind and interiority (the senses are all about externality), and makes such little use of his mind. A person with a strong consciousness could never be a materialist. Their own consciousness is the refutation of materialism. But what if you have an extremely poor level of consciousness? What if you feel mechanical and robotic and have very little mental interior? Then materialism might come easily to you. It might seem completely natural. You don’t have the imagination and intuition to see through the nonsense of materialism. It’s not reality that is meaningless, purposeless and pointless, it’s scientific materialism and the people who subscribe to it. Certain people decided that reality was meaningless – because they themselves could find no meaning in it due to their defective psyches – and they invented a meaningless ideology (materialism) to support their own lack of mental interiority and purpose. Materialism is made in their own robotic image. No one could reach conclusions about reality that were not consistent with the state of their own psyche. Only a certain portion of humanity are capable of seriously denying their own free will in order to support materialism. You would need to be drastically lacking in qualia, subjectivity, free will, and consciousness to find materialism remotely plausible.
Belief in materialism denotes mental illness. It means your psyche is operating at an exceptionally low level of activity. You have low cortical arousal. You enjoy barely any mental life at all.
The Right Answer We came across a bizarre comment from a materialist where he said that the Occam’s razor solution to existence – the most elegant solution – does not equate with the correct one. In fact, only the Occam’s razor solution can be correct. Anything that does not accord with Occam’s razor is ipso facto false. Occam’s razor delivers the simplest, most elegant, most beautiful, most economic, most stable, most universal, most complete, consistent and coherent solution. That’s the whole point of it. Scientific materialism delivers fantastically ugly, weird, overcomplicated, unstable, incoherent answers that self-evidently do not answer any of the framing questions of existence: what is existence, where does the universe come from, what is life, what is mind, what is matter, what is subjectivity, what are qualia, what is free will, what is the unconscious, what is consciousness, what is the purpose of existence, what is its meaning, what is its point? Occam’s razor can answer all of that. Scientific materialism absolutely cannot. Occam’s razor tells us that the answer to existence is zero entropy, the simplest and most beautiful system possible.
The Materialist Mania “Titus Lucretius Carus was an Epicurean poet of the late Roman republican era. His six-book Latin hexameter poem De rerum natura, variously translated On the nature of things and On the nature of the universe, survives virtually intact … As well as being a pioneering figure in the history of philosophical poetry, Lucretius has come to be our primary source of information on Epicurean physics, the official topic of his poem. Among numerous other Epicurean doctrines, the atomic ‘swerve’ is known to us mainly from Lucretius’ account of it. … Epicurus held that the elementary constituents of nature are undifferentiated matter, in the form of discrete, solid and indivisible particles (‘atoms’) below the threshold of perception, plus empty space, that is, the complement of matter or where matter is not… In its broad outline, Epicurus inherited this scheme from the earlier atomists, above all Democritus.” – The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
In the ancient world, the most fanatical materialists were the Atomists. They were amongst the first cohort of atheists. Lucretius, championing the cause of Epicurus, the Atomist, said, “The whole of Nature is of two things built, Atoms and Void.” As soon as you accept the existence of only matter and space to contain the matter, you are an atheist and a nihilist. No Atomist ever furnished a reason why reality would be constituted in such a way, and none of them ever gave any plausible explanation for how atoms generated unitary, subjective minds. Lucretius said, “Mind cannot arise alone without body, or apart from sinews and blood ... You must admit, therefore, that when then body has perished, there is an end also of the spirit diffused through it. It is surely crazy to couple a mortal object with an eternal and suppose that they can work in harmony and mutually interact.” As it turns out, it’s crazy not to couple the temporal and contingent with the eternal and necessary, the immanent with the transcendent. The immanent, temporal and contingent order is incapable of explaining itself. Answers must be found elsewhere, in the opposite categories, those of the analytic a priori (the eternal and necessary). For the Atomists, soul atoms were just a finer, rounder, smoother kind of atom. The Atomists equated soul atoms with atoms of fire. For Democritus, all soul atoms were alike. There was no distinction between rational and non-rational soul atoms. Sensation and thought took place throughout the body rather than being concentrated in the brain. Death was the end of a lifelong process of losing soul atoms. Once a critical number of soul atoms had departed from an animal, it died. The presence of a few remaining soul atoms led to twitching muscles after death, and might even support a kind of zombie-like, undead condition. The Epicureans rejected any soul function after death. Lucretius, echoing Epicurus, distinguished the mind from the rest of the soul. Explaining this, Nathaniel Campbell wrote, “To understand the nature of human action in the mind (animus), we must first understand the physical composition of the human soul (anima), a topic with which Lucretius deals at length in Book III. The soul is composed of four types of atoms. First,
we have the three ‘natures’ of the soul as observed from the soul as they leave the body of a dying person: wind or breath (aura), heat or warmth (vapor), and, always commingled with the heat, air (aer). None of these three can cause sensation and therefore thoughts in the mind, so there must be a fourth type of atom, nameless, which is the cause of sensations (sensifeorum motum). From these causation atoms arise sensations that pass first to the heat, then to the wind, next to the air atoms, and finally to atoms of the body in general; in this way the soul serves as, in modern parlance, the central nervous system.” In reality, these “causation atoms” are not material at all. The Atomists were paradigmatically unable to take a simple step: to conceive of immaterial atoms to accompany material atoms; transcendent atoms to accompany immanent atoms; dimensionless atoms to accompany dimensional atoms. Paradigms become extremely dangerous if they block off vital lines of thought. That, of course, is why paradigm shifts become essential. Science needs to undergo a paradigm shift to accommodate mind. That shift turns science into ontological mathematics, its replacement. Nathaniel Campbell wrote “Next, we examine the mind (animus) and see within it three natures: heat (calor), cold wind (frigida aura), and peaceful air (pacatus aer). These natures are not the same as the atoms which compose the soul; there is, however, a clear connection between them, and it seems that it is the sensation received by each type of atom that gives rise in the mind to the corresponding nature. It is these three natures that, in turn, give rise to human behavioral types. … The nature of each human is determined by the corresponding proportions of soul atoms within him: a preponderance of vapor soul atoms will create within him a nature more disposed to calor and hence to ira, and likewise with wind and air and with fear and tranquility, respectively.” The Epicurean soul consists of two parts: the “spirit” (anima) is spread throughout the body, while the “mind” (animus) is located in the chest, the command center of the body (many thinkers in the ancient world located the soul/mind in the heart, not the brain). The soul in both aspects is strictly corporeal (atomic). The “mind” is an aggregate of pure soul atoms situated in the breast, the seat of thought and volition. The spirit, the vital principle, is scattered throughout the body and mixed with the body atoms.
It is the loss of the mind (animus) that constitutes death, and so, there can be no consciousness after death, though motion could continue in various body parts where soul atoms still resided. Funnily enough, despite being totally preposterous, this is as good an explanation of mind as anything modern atomism has ever proposed! Lucretius said, “At this stage you must admit that whatever is seen to be sentient is nevertheless composed of atoms that are insentient. The phenomena open to our observation do not contradict this conclusion or conflict with it. Rather they lead us by the hand and compel us to believe that the animate is born, as I maintain, of the insentient.” It’s the same old stumbling block. Insentience cannot produce sentience. Objects cannot explain subjects. Matter cannot explain mind, free will, qualia, the unconscious, consciousness. Lucretius said, “Anything made out of destructible matter infinite time would have devoured before. But if the atoms that make and replenish the world have endured through the immense span of the past. Their natures are immortal – that is clear.” Big Bang theory has totally refuted Atomism. It is impossible for atoms, or any kind of matter, to be eternal. Matter is inherently temporal and contingent. It comes into existence and goes out of existence. It is made by mind and removed by mind. Think of your dreams. You create, out of your thoughts, a dreamworld, that you take to be a real material world, and then you remove the dreamworld when you wake up. Lucretius wrote, “Never can things revert to nothingness!” And nor can things come from non-existence, as science absurdly claims. Lucretius said, “Nor yet in this case do we allow that the eyes are at all deceived; for it is their business only to observe in whatever place there may be light or shade; but whether the light is the same or not, and whether the same shadow, which was here, passes thither, or rather, as we said before, a new one is constancy produced; this the judgment of the mind only must determine; for the eyes cannot know the nature of things; and therefore you must not impute to the eyes that which may be the fault of the understanding.”
So, Lucretius explicitly said, “the eyes cannot know the nature of things”, yet science is all about observation being the best way to understand reality. It’s not. The best way to understand reality is via reason and logic. To maintain otherwise is to prove that you are irrational and illogical. Scientists are empiricists. That means they are opposed to rationalism, and reject reason and logic. If scientists accepted reason and logic, the PSR, Occam’s razor and the laws of logic, these would be built into the scientific method. They’re nowhere to be found. Go figure. 1 + 1 = 2.
Aristotle versus Science Aristotle believed in matter as pure potentiality, in need of being actualized by intelligible form. For Aristotle, prime matter was non-being, in some qualified way. Mitchell Witteveen wrote, “Prime matter is materiality with no formality whatsoever. … the formal cause is for Aristotle and St. Thomas the source of a being’s act. Thus in so far as prime matter is matter utterly deprived of form, it is also utterly deprived of act. Yet, prime matter cannot be taken to be pure non-being, since it would be senseless to attempt to grasp at the essence of non-being. Rather, the prime matter must only be a non-being in a qualified sense, to borrow a distinction from On Generation and Corruption. That is, prime matter is not non-being per se but being entirely in potency.” Well, is there really any difference between non-being and being entirely in potency (completely non-actual)? Where would the difference be located? Could you point to prime matter? Could you encounter it as an object, or a substance? Could you observe it? Could you touch it? Could you define it? If you couldn’t, how could it be anything other than non-being? Prime matter is the weakest part of Aristotle’s philosophy. He became trapped by his notion of actuality (form) versus potentiality (matter). He should in fact have talked about syntax and semantics, or form and content (or matter) as two sides of a single ontological coin. Matter cannot exist separately from form, and cannot even be referred to on its own (as “pure potency”). Form is the syntax of matter, which is the semantic, observable aspect of form.
Scientific materialism has a system based on atomic matter, with “unreal” mathematics as the tool used to render it intelligible. (Mathematics replaces Aristotelian form.) In ontological mathematics, sinusoids are the base of the system, and these are dual-aspect form/content, syntax/semantics, form/matter entities. Instead of form being externally added to matter via “unreal” mathematics, mathematics is built into matter as its internal, integral form, which renders mathematics real rather than unreal. These are issues that can only be addressed via extremely careful definitions supplied by reason and logic. It is impossible to look at matter and realize it is made of pure math, of nothing but sinusoidal waves combined into wavefunctions. This truth is revealed through rational and logical deduction, not mere empirical observation (which in and of itself can’t tell you anything at all; observation can’t even distinguish between the matter we dream of, and the matter we encounter in the world – both are accepted by our senses as equally real). With ontological mathematics, we build form into matter (thus making matter an aspect of mathematics). With scientific materialism, form is added to matter by mathematics, which is considered an unreal, manmade abstraction, meaning that science can offer no real account of what matter is. It cannot make it intelligible, except by invoking unreality, a manifest contradiction in terms. Ontological mathematics, by contrast makes no reference to unreality. It’s ontologically and epistemologically absurd to rely on unreality to make your proposed description of reality intelligible, as science does. It can’t be stressed enough that science has to insist on the unreality of mathematics because if the ontology of mathematics is accepted, there’s no further need for science and it can be wholly replaced by ontological mathematics. Matter ceases to be something different from mathematics, to which “unreal” mathematics is artificially applied, and instead becomes a direct product of mathematics, made of mathematics, reflecting mathematical ontology and epistemology. In other words, scientific materialism is completely abolished and ontological mathematics takes its place. All of this comes about via an analysis of form – the intelligible aspect of reality.
Why is the Aristotelian treatment of form so limited and inadequate? It’s because Aristotelian form is handled in terms of manmade language, as opposed to reality’s own language of mathematics. Aristotle distinguishes between “substantial” and “accidental” forms. Socrates, a person, has a substantial form of “human”. That’s the Universal that defines him. Accidental forms correspond to categories other than substance (i.e. they are nonsubstantial; they do not define essence). To say that Socrates is wise is to apply an accidental form to Socrates. Socrates needs to be human to exist as a human, but he does not need to be wise to exist as a human. Forms such as this are “accidental” because they can undergo change, or be gained or lost, without changing the essential substance into something else, or causing it to cease to exist. Substantial forms, by contrast, cannot be gained or lost without changing the essential nature of the substance of which they are predicated. In relation to Socrates, “wise” is an accidental form and “human” the substantial form. Socrates could survive the loss of the former but not the latter. Anthony Kenny wrote, “Aristotle reverses the question asked by Plato: ‘What is it that two human beings have in common that makes them both human?’ He asks instead, ‘What makes two human beings two humans rather than one?’ And his answer is that what makes Socrates distinct from his friend Callias is not their substantial form, which is the same, nor their accidental forms, which may be the same or different, but their matter. Matter, not form, is the principle of individuation.” So, Aristotle defines Socrates by stating his Universal (his substantial form = “human”) and then listing all of his particulars (accidental forms). The same Universal and accidents could be listed of someone else, but they would be different from Socrates by virtue of their relationship with a different parcel of matter. This is a manmade, linguistic definition of a person. It’s not scientific, it’s not mathematical. It’s completely unquantitative. This applies to all of philosophy. Where are the numbers, the formulae, the quantities, the measurements, the predictions? The theory of evolution could never have occurred to Aristotle because the very act of seeing all animals in terms of completely distinct Universals meant they were inherently separated from each other, rather than being seen to be derived from a common ancestor from which multiple branches developed. Philosophy always goes wrong because it privileges manmade language over reality’s own language of mathematics. Philosophy has no method to make it
anything other than a set of speculations driven by manmade language, an inherently poor tool for understanding reality. Philosophy is cut off from the rational, logical, quantitative method of mathematics, and equally cut off from the empirical, quantitative method of science. Philosophy’s only “method” is to absurdly concentrate on the nuances of manmade language as if manmade language revealed the truth about reality. It does the opposite. It falsifies reality. It frames reality in a completely artificial, manmade way. Philosophy generates some good, valuable ideas, but it also delivers incredible intellectual confusion.
Primary and Secondary Qualities The empiricist John Locke highlighted a vital distinction that he believed helped to explain the material world more thoroughly. In fact, it radically threw into doubt the whole materialist project and any claims it had to reflecting reality. Locke asserted that we receive from our perceptions two kinds of simple ideas: 1) ideas which resemble their causes in the external world, and 2) ideas which do not resemble their causes in the external world. Most people, especially scientists, unthinkingly believe in empirical realism, which is to say they believe that when they observe they are seeing what is really there, what is objectively real. Imagine that everyone who looked at the world started to believe that some proportion of it wasn’t objectively real and was instead invented by our subjective mind. This proportion, you would realize after some reflection, could go from some low proportion of what you were observing to 100% of what you were observing. You would have no way of knowing for sure. In what way could you conduct science if you started to realize that some, many, or all, of your observations – which form the decisive step of the empirical scientific method – could be subjective, and didn’t actually exist in the world? Science would then be about your subjective response to reality, not about reality itself. That would raise another issue, of course: how could you distinguish between objective reality and your subjective reality? Descartes, with his method of doubt, constantly attacked the senses as a reliable means to interrogate reality. Descartes was a rationalist. John Locke, by contrast, was an empiricist. Empiricists, whose most fanatical exemplars are scientists, believe that the senses are the sole means to gather knowledge about the world. That’s why Step One of the scientific method isn’t to use reason and logic but instead to use the human senses
to observe the world. Descartes’ rationalist method of method of doubt is completely rejected by science since the very first thing that method attacks is the reality of what our observations reveal to us. As Descartes pointed out, our senses are such a poor indicator of reality that, when we are dreaming, we don’t even know it. We are having sensory experiences in our dreams, and everything seems totally real to us … even though it objectively isn’t. All rationalists, but no empiricists, understand that the senses are limited, fallible, unreliable and delusional, hence can’t possibly be any source of real knowledge. Is science possible if some portion of our observations corresponds to objective reality, and some portion doesn’t? This second portion is subjectively imposed by us on the world. How do we disentangle the objective from the subjective? Locke argued that the ideas which resemble their causes are the ideas of “primary qualities”, which he listed as texture, number, size, shape, and motion. The ideas which do not resemble their causes are the ideas of “secondary qualities”, which concern such things as color, sound, taste, and odor. If you see a book in the world, you assume that some rectangular object must really exist in the world. You do not believe you have projected a rectangle onto an object that actually has no resemblance to a rectangle. You believe that the explanation for the sensation of shape is shape in the external world. But what if you see a blue book? Does blue objectively exist in the world, or is that something you subjectively impose on the book? If you look at the “blue” book in different light, or in shadow, or surrounded by things of radically different colors, the book might start to appear less blue, or not blue at all, in which case blue is not located in the book but in your perception of the book in certain environmental conditions. In Locke’s system, explanations for secondary qualities refer only to primary qualities. Although the secondary qualities do not exist in the primary world, they are nevertheless caused by the primary qualities that do exist in the world. The secondary qualities don’t just magic themselves into existence. Locke built his worldview on the basis of Robert Boyle’s Corpuscular Hypothesis. Wikipedia says, “Corpuscularianism is similar to the theory of atomism, except that where atoms were supposed to be indivisible, corpuscles could in principle be divided. In this manner, for example, it was theorized that mercury could penetrate into metals and modify their inner structure, a step on the way towards the production of gold by transmutation. Corpuscularianism was associated by its leading proponents with the idea that some of the properties that objects appear to have are artifacts of the
perceiving mind: ‘secondary’ qualities as distinguished from ‘primary’ qualities. Corpuscularianism stayed a dominant theory for centuries and was blended with alchemy by early scientists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton in the 17th century.” Corpuscularianism was an early version of modern “atomism”. It was the bridge between alchemy and today’s chemistry. Yet many of the core ideas of corpuscularianism were already present in ancient Greek Atomism. Wikipedia says, “The different possible packings and scatterings of atoms within the void make up the shifting outlines and bulk of the objects that organisms feel, see, eat, hear, smell, and taste. While organisms may feel hot or cold, hot and cold actually have no real existence. They are simply sensations produced in organisms by the different packings and scatterings of the atoms in the void that compose the object that organisms sense as being ‘hot’ or ‘cold’.” Dr. Jan Garrett wrote, “Atomists teach that there are two kinds of knowledge, genuine and illegitimate. Genuine knowledge tells us about the atomic structure of things, and concerns the size, shape, arrangement and turning of the atoms. Yet what most mortals take to be knowledge is nothing of the sort; they speak of colors, smells, tastes, and so on – the experiences which are revealed to our senses. But our senses by themselves reveal nothing of the true reality which underlie them. “According to atomists, among the atoms and the void, there are no colors, smells, sounds, tastes: these are experiences born of the impact of atoms upon our senses (themselves aggregates of atoms). We all know that if our senses are altered, as occurs when a sick person becomes healthy, the same external stimulus produces a different experience. Therefore, the senses, without the true interpretation provided by the atomist philosophy, tell us nothing about reality. They give us only an illegitimate knowledge.” But some Atomists took a different view. The Jains (followers of the ancient Indian religion of Jainism) envisioned the world as consisting of atoms and souls. The BBC said, “Jains believe that the universe we perceive really exists and is not an illusion. It contains two classes of thing: jivas – living souls, and ajivas – non-living objects, which include everything else, including space.” Wikipedia says, “Atoms were considered as the basic building blocks of all matter. Each atom had ‘one kind of taste, one smell, one color, and two kinds of touch’ ... Atoms can exist in one of two states: subtle, in which case they can fit in infinitesimally small spaces, and gross, in which case they have extension and occupy a finite space.”
Here we encounter the notion that atoms objectively bear different colors, smells, tastes, and so on. Imagine a world of atoms of every different color, smell, taste, feeling. If you isolated one of the atoms of the Jains, you would see an atom with a specific color, a specific smell, taste and texture to the touch. In reality, most people have much the same idea as the Jains. They naively believe that the world is directly what it appears to be; we are not imposing anything on it with our subjective, internal mental processing. John Locke agreed with the Greek Atomists and his contemporary corpuscularians that the basic agents of matter are colorless, tasteless, soundless, and odorless, hence these all have to be subjectively added by our senses, albeit some objective process must presumably trigger these subjective impressions. For Locke, sensations of color, odor, taste, and sound are caused by the primary qualities of arrangements of matter. He refers to these arrangements as the ‘powers’ of objects to cause sensations. So, primary qualities are what are important because they account for all secondary qualities. Reality in itself is to be explained with regard to primary qualities alone. Secondary qualities have no fundamental basis in the real world but are in some way illusory or imposed over reality. In effect, science treats life, mind, free will, qualia, subjectivity, the unconscious and consciousness as secondary qualities, as emergent, epiphenomenal or illusory, but emphatically not belonging to primary reality, which is just “matter”. Secondary qualities are derived from the world but are not inherently part of it. If you removed all sensing beings, you would thereby remove all secondary qualities, but all the primary qualities would remain. Locke described breaking up a piece of wheat into smaller and smaller pieces. No matter how small the wheat gets, we cannot conceive of it without its primary qualities (shape, size, and so on). However, we could imagine wheat’s color, smell and taste vanishing as we got down to its basic constituents. In the Atomic view of reality, we could imagine the atoms without any sensory properties, but we could not imagine them without size, shape, speed, mass, and so on. The primary qualities are the mathematical qualities without which we could not conceive them at all. The secondary qualities are disposable accidents, in Aristotelian terms. SparkNotes says, “Locke next considers an almond that is being pounded with a pestle. As it gets broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, the color changes from a pure white to a dirtier hue, and the taste goes from sweet to oily. Yet all that was altered was
the texture of the nut. Clearly, he concludes, the secondary qualities depend on the primary qualities. … Finally, he takes the example of a flame. If we put our hand in the flame we have a sensation of pain. If we look at the flame we have a sensation of color. No one would claim that pain is in the flame itself, he points out, so why do we suppose that the color is?” The modern scientific worldview, predicated on a mathematical rather than a religious or a philosophical treatment, rapidly embraced “primary qualities” since these were exactly the kind of things amenable to mathematics. Wikipedia says, “Primary qualities are thought to be properties of objects that are independent of any observer, such as solidity, extension, motion, number and figure. These characteristics convey facts. They exist in the thing itself, can be determined with certainty, and do not rely on subjective judgments. For example, if an object is spherical, no one can reasonably argue that it is triangular. Primary qualities … inhere to an object in such a way that if the object was changed, i.e. divided, the primary qualities would remain.” In effect, what science has done is to restrict its assessment of reality to what is empirically measurable (these are the objective, primary qualities), and to expand the scope of secondary qualities to embrace everything else. Therefore, mind, life, free will, the unconscious, consciousness, qualia and subjectivity are all essentially classed as secondary qualities, produced by the primary qualities, which are the basic constituents of matter. If you removed atoms, so science claims, then mind, life, free will, the unconscious, consciousn ess, qualia and subjectivity would instantly vanish from reality. According to idealism, mind is primary reality and matter is secondary. Mind can eliminate matter. To see the truth of this, consider your own dreams. Your mind produces a dreamworld, which is fully accepted as a real material world, and then your mind gets rid of it when you wake up. The dreamer remains while dreamworlds come and go. The dreamworlds are temporal and contingent, not eternal and necessary. They are secondary, not primary. The very definition of what is primary and what is secondary is by no means unproblematic and uncontroversial, contrary to what materialists and empiricists such as Locke naively believed, and continue to believe. Wikipedia says, “When dividing an object, ‘solidity, extension, figure, and mobility’ would not be altered because the primary qualities are built into the object itself.”
Only eternal and necessary things can be primary. All the things to which they give rise – temporal and contingent combinatorial things – are secondary. The Source of the Big Bang was primary; the Big Bang universe is its secondary construct, hence space, time and matter are all secondary. They are emphatically not primary. Thought (frequency) is primary. Wikipedia says, “Another key component of primary qualities is that they create ideas in our minds through experience; they represent the actual object.” Here’s the problem – do “primary” qualities themselves have a more fundamental basis, which is therefore the true primary order, rendering the so-called primary qualities in fact secondary qualities? Wikipedia says, “Because of this, primary qualities such as size, weight, solidity, motion, and so forth can all be measured in some form.” What is the science of measurement? It’s mathematics. How could you measure anything without numbers, without mathematical comparators? How could you have any properties at all without mathematics? What are size, volume, density, speed, velocity, acceleration, mass, space, time without mathematics? Mathematics underpins them all, so isn’t mathematics therefore what is primary? You couldn’t have anything else without mathematics. Wikipedia says, “Secondary qualities are thought to be properties that produce sensations in observers, such as color, taste, smell, and sound. They can be described as the effect things have on certain people. Knowledge that comes from secondary qualities does not provide objective facts about things. Secondary qualities use the power of reflection in order to be perceived by our minds. These qualities ‘would ordinarily be said to be only a power in rather than a quality of the object’ [John Locke]. They are sensible qualities that produce different ideas in our mind from the actual object.” Primary and secondary qualities divide reality into quantitative (primary) qualities, handled by mathematics, and qualitative (secondary) qualities, experienced subjectively. Or we might say that primary qualities constitute form (syntax), while secondary qualities concern content (semantics). The extraordinary fact about science is that because of its hatred of the ontology of mathematics, it has effectively declared primary qualities unreal (mere manmade mathematics), and what it accepts as real is sensory reality, which is to say secondary, subjective phenomena, which have always been understood to be unreal! You couldn’t make it up.
Science doesn’t have a clue what reality is. If you removed all secondary qualities from reality, leaving just primary qualities, they would have no appearance (no subjective, observable properties), hence would not be part of scientific reality, which is predicated on observation (i.e. on secondary, perceptual, phenomenal, subjective “reality”). Science is all about appearances. It is not about reality in itself. If blue does not actually exist in the primary world, how does any amount of manipulation of the contents of the primary world produce blue? This exact same argument applies to mind, life, free will, qualia, subjectivity, the unconscious and consciousness. If none of these actually exist in the primary (material) world, how is primary matter able to produce them? By what means? For Locke, secondary qualities are “powers” in objects rather than inherent properties or qualities of objects. They have the “power” to cause the effects they do. “Power” is of course a non-explanatory term. Here we have the origin of all the other non-explanatory terms science deploys, such as “epiphenomenon”, “emergent property”, “illusion”, “unreality”, and so on. Religious types would just say “magical power” or “miracle”. Nothing can be added to reality that it does not already possess, at least in seed, in its primary properties. Secondary properties are not miraculously produced by primary properties. In fact, there are no secondary properties (as emergent properties). There are eternal and necessary properties – the independent basis properties of existence – and there are dependent temporal and contingent properties, which are simply the appropriate sum of the underlying basis properties. Nothing brand new comes into existence. Everything is an expression of what exists eternally and necessarily. This is total realism. All properties are real. None are fantastical, magical, miraculous, emergent, epiphenomenal, illusory or unreal. Some properties may be highly subjective. For example, your dreams are experienced only by you, but the properties of your dreams correspond to the very real activity going on your mind. They are not magicked into existence out of nothing at all. Everything we experience has a precedent. There are no unprecedented things, as emergentism claims, and as Locke’s “powers” imply. Wikipedia says, “A clear distinction to make is that qualities do not exist in the mind, rather they produce ideas in our minds and exist within the objects. In the case of primary qualities, they exist inside the actual body/substance and create an idea in our mind that resembles the object.”
Do you see how complicated this schema is? Material objects have qualities, but we do not encounter these themselves. Rather, they produce “ideas” in our minds. But how do they do that? In a materialist ideology, what on earth is an “idea”? How do material properties produce “ideas”? What’s the process? What are the mechanics of this? How do we know that “ideas” in any way accurately reflect the material qualities that provoke them? Why should they? In any case, we are experiencing a simulation of reality and not reality itself. We have no guarantee that the simulation bears any resemblance to reality. Are we merely experiencing an approximate phenomenon, and not getting to grips with the noumenon, the thing in itself? An approximate phenomenon is almost as bad as a hopelessly inaccurate phenomenon because it is impossible to extract what part of the approximate phenomenon is actually reflective of true reality. We can never know what the approximation is an approximation of, hence the information is useless! Wikipedia says, “Using an apple as an example, the shape and size can actually be measured and produce the idea in our minds of what the object is.” How do measurements produce ideas in minds? How do we know that the measurements we have recorded in our minds are anything like those of reality? Let’s imagine that our minds apply scaling factors. Let’s imagine that we phenomenally double or halve the measures of the noumena) or use some other proportionality). Let’s imagine that our minds magnify the world “out there” by a factor of 1,000,000 (hence “reality” is actually tiny and we can all fit into a snow jar, or whatever). How would we know that our minds hadn’t applied such a scaling factor? We have no knowledge at all about the relationship between supposed material reality and the mental representation of it. This is not in any way empirical. All we have access to are our mental ideas. We don’t actually know anything about the supposed material order, or if it even exists. This was the exact angle of attack that Bishop Berkeley launched against Locke’s system. The most parsimonious (Occam’s razor) solution he arrived at was that matter doesn’t exist at all! Only our ideas concerning matter exist. Berkeley was an idealist empiricist while Locke was a materialist empiricist. No materialist has ever refuted Berkeley. There is literally zero evidence – ZERO – that material reality exists. Everything we know about reality concerns ideas. Matter isn’t involved at all! Sadly, 100% of materialists are ignorant of the fact that idealism has already proven materialism to be completely false (since if it is wholly superfluous, it can’t be real).
There is not a material reality and then a second, mental reality of ideas somehow replicating it (this second reality would be redundant; it’s contrary to Occam’s razor, which automatically supports only one reality). There is only one reality – mental reality. Idealism is true. Materialism is false. Materialism is a surplus hypothesis. It is not required at all. Wikipedia says, “Going back to the example of the apple, something such as the redness of the apple does not produce an image of the object itself, but rather the idea of red.” Imagine an object with apple-like dimensions. This, according to Locke, produces an image of an apple-like object in our minds. Now imagine the color red. This does not produce any image of an object. It simply conjures the idea of red – red as an abstraction, not attached to any object. In Aristotelian terms, we would say that the substantial form of an apple corresponds to what Locke would define in terms of the apple’s “primary qualities”, its essential features, without which it could not be an apple. The redness of an apple or the sweetness of an apple are accidental forms. They are not essential to an apple. In effect, such accidental forms are what Locke calls “secondary qualities”. Wikipedia says, “Secondary qualities are used to classify similar ideas produced by an object. That is why when we see something ‘red’ it is only ‘red’ in our minds because they produce the same idea as another object. So, going back to the color of the apple, it produces an idea of red, which we classify and identify with other red ideas. Again, secondary qualities do not exist inside the mind; they are simply the powers that allow us to sense a certain object and thus ‘reflect’ and classify similar ideas.” Particular features are reflective of particular objects. All apples share in the “apple” Universal. But not all apples are red, so red is not part of the apple Universal. The red Universal applies to all objects that are red, of which there are many. Redness is not specific to any object. Wikipedia says, “According to the theory, primary qualities are measurable aspects of physical reality; secondary qualities are subjective.” In Aristotelian terms, we could rephrase this as: primary qualities express substantial form and are measurable (quantitative), while secondary qualities express accidental forms, which are not measurable (they are qualitative). So, Locke replaces Aristotelian forms – substantive and accidental – with measurable primary qualities, essential to the idea of the object, and unmeasurable secondary qualities, additional to the idea of the
object. Primary qualities produce the idea of the object itself and belong to the object itself, while secondary qualities are not in the object itself, but the object has the power to adorn the object with secondary ideas such as color, taste, smell, and so on. There’s something about the object that provokes these secondary ideas, but Locke had no clue what that might be, hence simply referred to it as a mysterious power of the object. Democritus the Atomist said, “By convention there are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by convention there is color; but in truth there are atoms and the void.” So, for the Atomists, atoms and void are the primary reality, and everything else is owed to them, but in some mysterious way since they do not belong to atoms or void. Nothing much has moved on in science. Science still can’t explain anything that is not a property of the atomic world, such as mass, charge, spin, and so on. How do you get from mass, charge, spin to life, mind, free will, the unconscious, consciousness, qualia and subjectivity? Go on, explain consciousness as a product of charge or spin or electric current. Leibniz’s “mill argument” runs as follows: “We must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is through shapes, size, and motions. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception. And so, one should seek perception in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.” If you blew up the brain to the size of a house, then walked through it, where would you discover qualia, subjectivity, the unconscious, consciousness, free will, thinking, reasoning, abstraction, philosophy, emotion, love, hate? How does matter make these things? Don’t ask a scientist. Science hasn’t made one iota of progress in explaining how “secondary” qualities – absent from matter in itself – appear in the universe. It will never solve this problem because matter simply isn’t the primary basis of existence. Sinusoidal waves (basis thoughts) are, and these have wholly different properties from matter. They have both syntactic properties that we can quantitatively measure, and semantic properties that we can qualitatively experience.
Blue has a syntax associated with it, and when we empirically encounter that exact syntax, we automatically experience the color blue. Blue is not magically produced by measurable matter. It is in fact the semantic expression of measurable syntax. This is a dual-aspect system. The “secondary” qualities are just the semantic expression of the “primary” qualities, the syntax. You can’t get the one without the other. They always come as a dual-aspect pair. It’s impossible to have apples devoid of color, or taste, or smell, or texture. They are built into the apple. Matter can’t capture them but that’s because there’s no such thing as scientific matter. Matter is just a heuristic concept science uses for modeling purposes. Science, it can’t be repeated enough, simulates reality in useful ways, but it is no kind of accurate, truthful account of reality. It has use value but no truth value. Galileo said, “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.” Do you see the problem here? Galileo is assuming a dualistic reality – that of material objects on the one hand and that of consciousness on the other. Materialists can’t do this, of course. They are committed to explaining consciousness in terms of matter alone since matter is the only thing they believe in. You can’t magic subjectivity out of objective atoms in order to account for subjectivity! Leibniz – such an astounding genius – was one of the first to attack Locke’s system. He wrote, “It is even possible to demonstrate that the ideas of size, figure and motion are not so distinctive as is imagined, and that they stand for something imaginary relative to our perceptions as do, although to a greater extent, the ideas of color, heat, and the other similar qualities in regard to which we may doubt whether they are actually to be found in the nature of the things outside of us.” In other words, if we regard secondary qualities as creating ideas that do not correspond to reality itself, why shouldn’t we then treat primary qualities in precisely the same way? How do we know that the primary qualities truly reflect reality in itself? How would we demonstrate the supposed link between the qualities and reality?
Bishop Berkeley, whose views have a significant commonality with Leibniz’s, launched the most sustained attack on Locke’s position. Berkeley not only abolished matter entirely, but also called into question objective reality by insisting that things existed only while they were being perceived. Wikipedia says, “Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is a 1713 book on metaphysics and idealism written by George Berkeley. Taking the form of a dialogue, the book was written as a response to the criticism Berkeley experienced after publishing A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. ...” All revolutionary thinkers come under absurd attacks. Although we disagree with the central empiricism of Berkeley, he was unquestionably a brilliant thinker, whose philosophy ought to be far better known. Wikipedia says, “Berkeley’s views are represented by Philonous (Greek: ‘lover of mind’), while Hylas (‘hyle’, Greek:‘matter’) embodies the Irish thinker’s opponents, in particular John Locke.” All idealists belong to the company of Philonous, while all materialists (Hylics, Somatics) follow Hylas. Wikipedia says, “In The First Dialogue, Hylas expresses his disdain for skepticism, adding that he has heard Philonous to have ‘maintained the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit, that there is no such thing as material substance in the world.’ Philonous argues that it is actually Hylas who is the skeptic and that he can prove it. Thus, a philosophical battle of wit begins.” Isn’t it remarkable that it’s unclear who the true skeptics are? Are the idealists the skeptics because they dismiss the existence of scientific matter, or are the materialists the skeptics because they dismiss the very minds with which they think and perceive! Wikipedia says, “Philonous questions Hylas systematically regarding what humans know of the world, first examining secondary qualities, such as heat, to show that such qualities do not exist outside the individual mind. He then moves on to primary qualities such as extension and shape, and likewise argues that they, too, are dependent entirely on one’s perception and perspective (e.g., From a distance, a great mountain appears to be small, and the shape of a thing may change dramatically under a microscope: ‘You may at any time make the experiment, by looking with one eye bare, and with the other trough a microscope.’”
The most amazing thing about scientists, and materialists in general, is how skeptical they are about non-matter, yet they have no skepticism at all towards matter. In this regard they resemble Christians. Christians are 100% skeptical to all religions that are not Christianity, and 0% skeptical towards Christianity. Skeptics are always marked by their total lack of skepticism towards whatever position they are defending. Wikipedia says, “Berkeley maintained that the ideas created by sensations are all that people can know for sure. As a result, what is perceived as real consists only of ideas in the mind. The crux of Berkeley’s argument is that once an object is stripped of all its secondary qualities, it becomes very problematic to assign any acceptable meaning to the idea that there is some object. Not that one cannot picture to oneself (in one’s mind) that some object could exist apart from any perceiver – one clearly can do this – but rather, that one cannot give any content to this idea.” If you stripped all color, smell, taste, sounds and tactile sensations from objects, what would be left? You would simply have primary qualities, which would correspond to sterile, invisible, mathematical objects moving in invisible space-time – hardly what materialists imagine by materialism. Wikipedia says, “Suppose that someone says that a particular mind-independent object (meaning an object free of all secondary qualities) exists at some time and some place. Now, none of this particularly means anything if one cannot specify a place and time. In that case it’s still a purely imaginary, empty idea. This is not generally thought to be a problem because realists imagine that they can, in fact, specify a place and time for a ‘mind-independent’ object. What is overlooked is that they can only specify a place and time in place and time as we experience them. Berkeley did not doubt that one can do this, but [did doubt] that it is objective. One has simply related ideas to experiences (the idea of an object to our experiences of space and time). In this case there is no space and time, and therefore no objectivity.” In ontological mathematics, space and time do not exist as mindindependent dimensions, but as mind-created modalities. They are framing projections of the mind. The mind creates a dimensional spacetime hologram within the mental Singularity. Wikipedia says, “Space and time as we experience them are always piecemeal (even when the piece of space is big, as in some astronomical photos), it is only in imagination that they are total and all-encompassing, which is how we definitely imagine (!) ‘real’ space and time as being.”
Space and time are non-empirical. No one can observe time in itself or space in itself. What people observe are clocks and rulers. But these are ways of performing time and space measurements. They reveal nothing of what time and space are ontologically and epistemologically. No scientist seems to be aware of science’s catastrophic ignorance of what time and space actually are. Science has an instrumental understanding of reality, useful for modeling, not an ontological and epistemological understanding of reality, essential for establishing the truth of existence. Wikipedia says, “This is why Berkeley argued that the materialist has merely an idea of an unperceived object: because people typically do take our imagining or picturing, as guaranteeing an objective reality to the ‘existence’ of ‘something’. In no adequate way has it been specified nor given any acceptable meaning. As such Berkeley comes to his conclusion that having a compelling image in the mind, one which connects to no specifiable thing external to us, does not guarantee an objective existence.” Most people don’t realize that they’re entirely guilty of what Berkeley accuses them of: relating ideas of things to experiences of things, mixing conceptions and perceptions. Does the falling tree make a sound when there is no one there to hear it? Automatically, people imagine themselves in a forest, watching a falling tree (i.e. they are present to hear it!). Imagine a tree stripped of every property other than its mathematical dimensions. It’s impossible. You immediately impose a visible tree template, but that’s exactly what you are not allowed to do. Without secondary qualities, the tree is totally invisible and no one can an imagine an invisible world. Wikipedia says, “David Hume argued that we have no impressions of primary qualities at all, but rather only various impressions that we tend to group together into some particular mind-independent quality. Thus, according to Hume, primary qualities collapse into secondary qualities, making the distinction far less helpful than it first might have seemed.” Locke thought that creating a distinction between primary and secondary qualities was some great insight. In fact, as more subtle thinkers realized, the difference between primary and secondary qualities cannot be sustained. The same arguments that are used to undermine secondary qualities can be extended to primary qualities too, leaving nothing for the materialist to cling to. The whole concept of scientific matter is absurd, but materialists just haven’t thought hard enough about what matter is supposed to be.
Immanuel Kant went even further than Berkeley and denied that even our subjective perceptions were real. He reduced all perceptions to phenomena and declared that noumenal reality, reality in itself, was completely unknowable. In other words, whatever matter really is, is beyond the human capacity to know. Isn’t it remarkable that materialists take “matter” so much for granted, yet philosophy has demonstrated that the very concept of matter is incoherent? No formal meaning can be attached to scientific matter. Scientists don’t care about the objections to materialism. They ignore them and continue regardless with their naïve assumptions. “Matter” is a useful heuristic in modeling observable, phenomenal reality, but “matter” has no reality in itself. Matter, as envisaged by scientists, is not a concept with any truth value. It’s a manmade fallacy that has use value in certain modeling contexts, but is 100% incapable of explaining existence and addressing mind, life, free will, subjectivity, qualia, the unconscious, consciousness and the cause of the Big Bang universe. “Matter” is now doing enormous damage to humanity’s pursuit of the Truth of existence. Scientific materialism is holding back the evolution of the human race. The transition to ontological mathematics is essential for the progress of humanity. Wikipedia says, “Kant, in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science, claimed that primary, as well as secondary, qualities are subjective. They are both mere appearances that are located in the mind of a knowing observer.” For Kant, appearances were all the human mind could access. The reality behind the appearances – what the appearances were appearances of – was permanently inaccessible. Kant wrote, “Long before Locke’s time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.) – no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible.”
Kant not only called the status of matter into radical doubt (what is “matter” if it is assigned to an unknowable reality?), he abolished space and time as real entities. Since these are essential to any possible definition of matter as real, if they are rendered purely mental – in the mind of the individual beholder – then matter becomes merely a mental phenomenon, and matter in itself is rendered a perfect mystery. Wikipedia says “[According to Kant’s transcendental idealism], space and time are mere forms of intuition, which means that any quality that can be attributed to the spatiotemporal objects of experience must be a quality of how things appear to us rather than of how things are in themselves. Thus, while Kant did not deny the existence of objects beyond all possible experience, he did deny the applicability of primary quality terms to things in themselves.” In the modern day, one of the reasons why we aren’t free of mainstream religion is that science and philosophy refuse to attack them and to constantly undermine them. They are therefore given free rein to go on spreading their nonsense. Likewise, much of the nonsense peddled by scientism continues to be perpetuated because science refuses to engage with any criticism. Scientists like to claim that science is made robust by “peer-reviewed” papers. Well, where are the peer-reviewed papers refuting Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Hartmann? Science doesn’t have anyone capable of addressing idealism’s critique of scientism. In The Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset wrote, “The specialist ‘knows’ very well his own tiny comer of the universe; he is radically ignorant of all the rest. Here we have a precise example of this strange new man, whom I have attempted to define, from both of his two opposite aspects, I have said that he was a human product unparalleled in history. The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant: those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories, He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is ‘a scientist,’ and ‘knows’ very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.”
This sums up the modern scientist. The modern scientist is so ignorant that he dismisses philosophy, without knowing the first thing about it, without knowing that he has already been refuted by it. Science is a falsified ideology. Science just doesn’t know it because it refuses to acknowledge the arguments that falsify it. It ignores everything that refutes it. The scientific specialist is the most narrow of thinkers. He’s an expert who, so to speak, understands trees, but can’t grasp what a forest is. He literally can’t see the wood for the trees. Scientists are philosophically illiterate. They have never studied philosophy so are wholly unaware that science cannot address any of the devastating attacks by philosophy on the whole materialistic schtick. Science survives because it is very useful, not because it is very truthful. In fact, it has no truth at all. It’s just a useful model, a useful heuristic. No end of science – limitless science – would still be unable to explain what reality is … because reality isn’t scientific at all. It’s mathematical!
The Soul Scientists laugh at the concept of the soul. Here’s what they are laughing at: Immaterial singularities. Autonomous Fourier frequency domains that produce spacetime via the operations of ontological Fourier mathematics. Eternal and necessary mind atoms conveying the law of the conservation of energy. Photonic atoms. Formal atoms. Atoms with atomic number of zero. Non-space, non-time monads. Nodes of the Cosmic Hive Mind that produced the Big Bang. The living cells of the Source. The components of ontological mathematics.
Entities that exist at zero entropy and a temperature of Absolute Zero. They are frictionfree and perfectly superconductive. Ontological instantiations of the generalized Euler Formula. Ontological conveyors of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the laws of logic. Sinusoidal wave systems. Heisenberg “uncertainty” systems (infinite energy concentrated at a point). So, what exactly is it that scientists find so funny? It’s “matter” that is comical. There is no such thing. Everything that passes as matter is in fact the construct of eternal minds, aka souls.
Transubstantiation “At the heart of the doctrine of the Eucharist is the assertion that while the appearance before us is one of bread (or wine), the substance present after the conversion is Christ’s Body (or His Blood).” – Dr. William Newton Catholics believe that, at Mass, bread and wine are transmuted into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It reveals how deeply materialist Catholic faith is at core that it literally wants to ingest its God. What’s wrong with spiritual communion with the Godhead? Why would you eat the Godhead? What a bizarre notion. Yet not unprecedented. In the ancient Greek religion of Orphism (based on Orpheus, a great sage and musician, bringing together the worship of the rival gods Apollo and Dionysus), Dionysus as a child, then going by the name “Zagreus”, was tracked down and surrounded by the Titans. These were the old generation of gods, supplanted by the Olympians under Zeus, and subsequently regarded as demons and devils. The Titans tore little Dionysus to pieces, cooked him, and ate him. Zeus, in his fury, struck the Titans with lightning, and they were devoured by fire. From their ashes came the first humans, possessed of both the evil nature of the Titans and the divine nature of the gods. (From the get-go, humans were dialectical, torn, conflicted creatures, both good and evil, in an internal war with themselves, which all too often spilled out into war with others.) Here we find the idea that the consumption of gods fundamentally impacts our nature. If you could consume more and more of Jesus, you would surely become more like
Jesus! That’s no doubt how the primitive Christian mind thought. Cannibal warriors always ate the most valiant warriors they killed in order to absorb their powers and become even stronger warriors. Catholic theologians wanted to explain transubstantiation in intellectual rather than purely faith terms and turned to Aristotelian hylomorphism and its key distinction between substance and accident. Substance tells us what a thing is, while accident tells us about a property of the thing that is not essential to a thing. Socrates needs to have the substantial form of “human” in order to be human. Socrates does not need to be wise to be a human, so his wisdom is an accident of Socrates rather than an integral feature. His wisdom is not part of his essential definition. He could exist without it. So, accidents can change without the substance changing. Transubstantiation involves an inversion of this process. The accidents stay the same, while the substance changes. The bread and wine of the Mass undergo a transmutation of substance, not of accident (superficial appearance). The bread and wine look exactly the same as before, because no alteration is made to their accidents, yet their substance is now that of something completely different. They have been transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. To be fair, this is actually quite ingenious! The underlying idea is absurd, but the framing of the miracle is given a degree of philosophical respectability. While it might seem amazing that what appears to be bread and wine is now actually the Body and Blood of Christ, no contradiction is involved (in the hylomorphic scheme), due to the fact that the miracle of transubstantiation occurs at the essential level of substance rather than the accidental level of appearance. Thomas Aquinas said, “Here beneath these signs are hidden priceless things, to sense forbidden; signs, not things, are all we see. Flesh from bread, and Blood from wine, yet is Christ in either sign.” Funnily enough, something similar could be said in relation to ontological mathematics. Mathematics is the substance, the essence, of everything, but no one sees mathematics in its noumenal (substantial) form. They see it in its phenomenal (accidental) form, and they don’t associate its appearance with mathematics but with scientific “matter”. As the bread and wine is to the body and blood of Christ, matter is to mathematics: it’s the
superficial appearance, but it’s not telling you anything at all about the substance, which is unavailable to observation. When the Alchemists sought to transform base metal into gold, they of course wanted to change the substance of the metal, and that would automatically entail the change of the appearance of the metal. The clever maneuver of the Catholic theologians was to claim that a substantial change, a change of essence, could occur without any change to appearance. Many a conman has no doubt wanted to sell lead as gold. Using the Catholic precedent, he need only say that the lead has undergone a change of substance into that of gold, while retaining its former appearance as lead. Would many Catholic theologians buy the lead that still looked light lead, but which they had been assured was now actually gold? The factor that the Catholic theologians missed was that substances also have a defining appearance and constitution. Given that gold and lead have totally different properties, you could never say that lead actually concealed gold. If a wizard said he had turned Socrates into a frog, would you believe him? The substantial form of “human” entails a human appearance, not a frog appearance. You cannot change the substance without changing the appearance that necessarily accompanies the substance. If transubstantiation involved the conversion of bread and wine into actual flesh and blood, that really would be something! But it doesn’t. Like all things of faith, you have to accept the claim without the slightest evidence that it is true. The theologian spins you a little yarn, but is it remotely convincing? Transubstantiation, despite its attempt to harness Aristotelian philosophy, never rises above the level of magic and wizardry where people believe that humans can be transformed into frogs while still retaining their humanity. This is definitively impossible. If you lack the human substantial form – human DNA, we would now say – you are not human! The theology of transubstantiation is really a desperate attempt to explain why a miracle has taken place at Mass when it is self-evident that no miracle has happened. When miracles occur at the level of invisibility, they are not miracles, they are just cynical
con
jobs,
wholly
reliant
on
a
person’s
faith.
Catholics
believe
in transubstantiation. Non-Catholics don’t. There is nothing a Catholic can show to a non-Catholic that would ever convince or convert a non-Catholic.
We would all be Catholics if transubstantiation was real and shown to be real by a real process. Instead, we are shown bread and wine and then told that a great miracle has occurred even though everything is exactly the same as before. It’s amazing how people fall for it. Who would go to a magic show where no magic actually happened but the magician simply told you it happened, and that you required faith in order to enjoy the show? The Catholic Mass is the greatest magic show of all because the magician (the priest) tells you that he has manifested God in front of you, and his congregation believe him, even though everything is exactly the same as before and there is not a single sign that Elvis (God) is in the room. It has been pointed out that Jesus Christ must have an absolutely vast body mass by now if every Catholic Mass converts bread into his flesh. On the other hand, it could be argued that this process is actually depleting Christ’s flesh, since each Mass strips flesh from him in order to make it available to the congregation, so he should have been stripped bare by now and have no flesh left to give. Dr William Newton wrote, “Self-Subsisting Accidents: the doctrine of the Real Presence relies upon us believing Christ when he says ‘this is My Body’ and believing our senses when we see before us the appearance of bread. From these two points of reference, we must conclude that the accidents of bread (that clearly do remain after the consecration) are self-subsisting, which is to say that they do not exist, as accidents normally do, in a substance. They cannot exist in the substance of bread since the bread is no longer present and they cannot have their existence in the substance of Christ’s body because the substance of a human body is not the proper substance for the accidents of bread: human bodies simply do not have the texture, color, and so on, of bread. By deduction, then, the accidents of bread must exist independently of any substance.” This violates the whole basis of Aristotelian hylomorphism. The only matter that can exist independently of substance is prime matter, but prime matter is pure potentiality. It has no being, it has no form. You can’t see it! Hylomorphism doesn’t prove transubstantiation, it in fact falsifies it! Dr William Newton wrote, “At first sight, this would seem to be a contradiction even from within Aristotle’s own philosophical system. The very definition of a substance is that which exists in itself and not in another thing, whereas accidents are defined
precisely in contra-distinction to this: they exist in something else, namely in a substance.” Exactly right! This is fatal for Catholicism, but Catholicism doesn’t give up. It then has to find another angle to justify the conclusion with which it began: that transubstantiation is true. By the way, science operates in exactly the same way. Science begins with its conclusion that materialism is true and it never accepts any falsification of materialism, regardless of how irrefutable that falsification is. It simply appeals to something else, some very far-fetched argument, to shore up its beliefs. Quantum mechanics should have refuted scientific materialism. Instead, science just interpreted quantum mechanics in irrational and bizarre ways and claimed it was still consistent with materialism, even though it plainly wasn’t. In the end, rather than face up to its problems, it just snarled, “Shut up and calculate!”, which is the Catholic equivalent of a priest saying to someone asking awkward questions about transubstantiation, “Shut up and believe already!” So, what does Dr William Newton say to try to defend transubstantiation? He wrote, “The way out of this seeming contradiction is to mount another distinction within Aristotle’s philosophical system, this time the distinction between primary and secondary causality. For Aristotle and Aquinas, the universe is full of secondary causes. These are beings that have quasi-autonomous causal power. For example, apple trees have inherent power to produce apples: apple trees are the secondary cause of apples. However, I was careful to say quasi-autonomous because, among other things, given that secondary causes (like apple trees) do not account for their own existence, they must receive both their existence and their causal power from a primary agent (aka God). Hence, if the primary cause wants to bypass or leap-frog the secondary cause and produce the effect directly … he certainly may: Every created agent is limited to bringing about a change in form only, but God can bring about changes at the level of being.” Newton argues that substances are the secondary cause of the existence of accidents. However, this causal power ultimately flows from the primary agent, the first cause – God. If God wants to hold the accidents of bread in existence without the substance of bread, he can.
There are two problems here. Firstly, it was Thomas Aquinas, not Aristotle, who talked about primary and secondary causes. He argued that God was the “Primary Cause” of the being of everything, and “secondary causes” related to the created world and ultimately depended on divine action. But in Aristotle’s system, “God” is not any kind of theist. Aristotle’s God neither creates the universe, nor pays any attention to it, nor interacts with it in any way. He does not, by any divine action, cause anything in the world. Rather, his mere existence causes the world to love him – although Aristotle can offer no convincing account of how the world even knows about God in order to love him given that God has no connection to the world. Aristotle likes to have his cake and eat it, and so does Aquinas. If God is the primary cause of everything, where is free will, and why is God not deemed the direct cause of evil? You can’t have it both ways. You can’t invoke God when it suits you and leave him out when it doesn’t. Secondly, Newton is no longer appealing to any kind of philosophy but is basically saying that God is a magical Sky Wizard and can perform whatever miracle he likes. That could only be convincing to someone who believes in God. To someone who doesn’t, it’s a non-explanation, a joke, an absurdity. Newton is trying to persuade people that his beliefs stand up to intellectual scrutiny when in fact they are 100% based on his personal religious faith. Newton says, “The doctrine of the real presence includes the assertion that Christ is fully present under both species (under the appearance of bread and under the appearance of wine) as well as fully present under each particle of each species. The latter means that when a consecrated host is fractured into two, Christ is fully present in each half.” This kind of argument is normally reserved for the doctrine of what philosopher Henry More called “holenmerism”: the claim that the mind is whole in the whole body and whole in all of its parts. It’s one thing to assert this of the immaterial mind, quite another to assert this of any kind of matter. Newton sums up his apology for transubstantiation with the following words: “It is important to be clear as to what we have been up to here. We have not mounted philosophical arguments that prove Christ is really present in the Eucharist despite appearances, or that He is wholly present in each part of each consecrated host; nor have we proved, from reason alone, that He is really present in a consecrated host in the Cathedral of Tokyo and Paris at the same time. These things we assent to by the virtue
of faith. However, what we have done, with the help of Aristotle, is show how these amazing assertions are not contradictions – they are not impossibilities.” In actual fact, they are contradictions and they are impossibilities, but if you are the kind of person, like Newton, who assents to a proposition by virtue of faith, rational contradictions and impossibilities are hardly likely to detain you. Had Aristotle been around at the same time as Thomas Aquinas, he would have denounced him and rubbished the idea of the Christian God.
The Understanding Thomas Aquinas wrote, “But the rational soul plainly exceeds matter in its operation, for it has an operation in which no bodily organ takes part; namely, the act of understanding.” This is a key point. Philosophers and theologians have always argued that reasoning and understanding can only be done by intellects, which animals do not possess. In Greek philosophy, animals have mortal minds, which die with their body. Only the intellectual mind – the nous – is immortal. It instructs the body but is not part of the body. Scientists, since they are strict materialists, reject the immaterial nous. They claim that the material brain, composed of mindless atoms, can think, can reason, can know, can understand. The brain, as we all know, is ultimately made of food and drink, so according to science, food and drink can think and reason. Who knew?! The talking snakes of the Bible have nothing on the talking food of scientism!
No Prime Matter? Thomas Aquinas denied that prime matter existed in its own right, independent of form. For Aquinas, matter is always configured by form, always exists under dimensions, and so this prime matter rather than that prime matter is configured by the accidental form of quantity; more specifically, the accidental quantity of existing in three dimensions.
However, in what way is prime matter – pure potentiality; universal matter – still prime matter once it is particularized by a particular form? The Catholic Encyclopedia says, “For St. Thomas primordial matter is the common ground of substantial change, the element of indetermination in corporeal beings. It is a pure potentiality, or determinability, void of substantiality, of quality, of quantity, and of all the other accidents that determine sensible being.” Primordial (prime) matter is matter conceived wholly independently of form, but no such thing can exist in the sensible world. It must be coupled to an intelligible form to make it an object in nature, but as soon as that happens it becomes the particular matter of the object. In ontological mathematics, we could speculatively think of Prime Matter in terms of static points. These are non-existence. They have no properties at all. They do nothing. Prime Form concerns flowing points (moving points, dynamic points). These move in circles (Euler circles), with no beginning and no end (they are eternal and necessary), not in lines with a beginning and thus an end (which would therefore be temporal and contingent). As flowing points trace out Euler circles, they generate sinusoidal waves, as per Euler’s Formula. A full set of sinusoidal waves corresponds to the substantial form of a monad, the basic unit of life and mind, and thus the basic unit of matter since all matter is produced by living mind. Therefore, scientific matter, in these terms, is a potentiality of pure form and is generated when eternal and necessary basis waves enter into temporal and contingent combinations. Scientific matter belongs to prime mathematical form as one of its potentialities.
Form For Plato, Form was transcendent and was applied to the immanent world by the Demiurge (the Creator, so to speak). In Aristotle’s system, God (pure Form) had nothing to do with the world and certainly didn’t create it. For Aristotle, all the forms evident in the natural world were immanent, not transcendent. Wikipedia says, “The Aristotelian conception of form was adopted by the Scholastics, to whom, however, its origin in the observation of the physical universe was an entirely
foreign idea. The most remarkable adaptation is probably that of Aquinas, who distinguished the spiritual world with its subsistent forms (formae separatae) from the material with its inherent forms which exist only in combination with matter.” Ernst Bloch wrote, “Thomas posits a wide divide between body and soul, which in Aristotle is no way clear, between formae inhaerentes of the world, trapped in matter, and the immaterial formae separatae of the supernatural world, with the pure divine SpiritForm at its apex.” Ultimately, all forms are immaterial. They are sinusoidal forms, the basis of all syntax and semantics. Their material aspect is made visible (phenomenal) via the semantic aspect. As for syntax, we only encounter this indirectly. No amount of observation would ever reveal that the syntax of everything in the universe reduces to the syntax of sinusoidal basis waves. That’s why science, based on observation (empiricism), is so flawed.
Socrates Socrates, famous for his wisdom, could exist without his wisdom, but not without his soul. Wisdom is an “accident”, while the soul is the substantial form, the monadic formula for existence. Everything is about the soul, the substance. The soul is foundational existence.
Syntax-Semantics Causation Ontological mathematics is a dual-aspect monism of syntax and semantics (information carrier and information carried). This is a critical consideration when it comes to causation, and makes ontological mathematics entirely different from scientific materialism. The dual-aspect causation provided by ontological mathematics is exactly what explains the character of free will, something wholly inexplicable in scientific terms. To understand how ontological mathematical causation works, and the incredible difference it makes, consider the following example. A man is walking along the sidewalk when a gust of wind catches him and causes his arm to involuntarily shoot up into the air. This would be called syntactic causation. The wind has no intentions when it forces the man’s arm into the air, and the man has no
intention of raising his arm. His arm is raised as a matter of course by the operations of purely external, syntactic causation. It’s default causation. No agent, no man, is free when it comes to this type of causation. No will is in operation. Now consider the situation where a man simply chooses to raise his arm. There is something totally different about this kind of causation. No external agent is forcing something to happen. The man’s arm is raised because of internal causation, because he freely wills it to rise. Consider what is involved in this simple action. Let’s go through it step by step. Firstly, imagine a man thinking of raising his arm. Does it then rise? No, it doesn’t. Why not? Because thinking of raising your arm isn’t the same as raising your arm. To actually raise your arm, you must do two things: think it and will it. Willing an action is that vital step when you convert a possible action into an actual action, when you “collapse the wavefunction”, to use the jargon of quantum mechanics. But what does “willing” an action actually entail? What it means is that you not only contemplate the action, as a hypothetical action, but you issue the syntactic commands to execute it. The genius of this system is that you don’t have to calculate how each muscle must move in order for your arm to do what you want. All of the complex syntactic,
mathematical
calculations
are
internalized.
They
are
conducted
unconsciously, automatically, like the beating of your heart. This is possible exactly because of the dual-aspect system of syntax and semantics. What this means is that there is a one-to-one mapping between the semantic description of reality and the syntactic structure of reality. To consciously think of an action in manmade language (a semantic procedure) instantly readies the unconscious syntax required to action it (as the opposite side of the same coin in the dual-aspect system). Willing is the decision to execute the semantic thought and its associated syntax. All of these essential considerations are absent from scientific materialism. There is no dual-aspect system in science. There is no internal agency, there is no free will. For science, a man’s decision to lift his arm is no different in kind from a man’s arm being raised by a gust of wind. Both actions are caused by default syntactic actions,
automatic, devoid of will, devoid of free will, with absolutely no purpose, meaning or point. According to science, you do not freely choose to raise your arm. Rather, the lifeless, mindless unfree atoms of which you are made, subject to the unfree laws of physics, cause, in some obscure way – never explained by science – your arm to raise itself at a particular point in time. You epiphenomenally experience this action, over which you had no say at all (it was all handled by external physics) as a conscious choice on your point, i.e. you experience the epiphenomenon or “illusion” that you have exercised your free will, when in fact it all happened without any conscious decisions on your part. You, according to science, are incapable of freely choosing what to do. You are part of an inescapable nexus of immanent causation which has no scope whatsoever for free action. Only transcendent entities, outside the immanent world, can inject their own free actions into the immanent world. Only such entities are not bound by immanent causation, hence are free to do their own thing, by their own direction, independent of the immanent laws of physics. Freedom is possible only in a system of transcendent monads, each with its own independent agency. In science, there are no transcendent elements. There is only one immanent system, in which everything is bound together, hence everything is compelled to obey the common laws of physics, and there are no agents that can insert their own independent execution of the laws of physics into the mix. Free will is exactly that: the capacity of entities to execute actions on their own account, insulated from any slavish dependence on the external environment. In science, there is nothing but the external environment. In science, there are no subjects, no entities with independent agency, no entities with interiority. The atoms of which you are composed belong to the immanent world. They don’t belong to you. These atoms obey the laws of the immanent universe. They don’t obey your laws. There is no “you”. You are simply an epiphenomenon, an unreal, illusory entity subject to a bizarre delusion that you can exercise freedom. In ontological mathematics, by contrast, you are genuinely a real being, capable of directing your own actions. That’s because you are a transcendent monad, not an immanent collection of atoms. The sinusoids of which your monadic mind is made are
uniquely yours, unlike the case in science where the atoms of which you are made are definitely not yours, but are just lifeless, mindless objects in the world. Science can never explain free will precisely because science is about immanence and has no transcendent elements, the latter being essential to freedom. You cannot exercise freedom if no part of you is you, if every part of you belongs to the immanent world, under the control of the immanent world. Ontological mathematics provides the complete explanation of causation. Science is tragically incomplete in relation to its account of causation. In fact, science increasingly rejects causation and bases everything on randomness and probabilities. Things don’t happen in science for any reason or cause. Rather, so science claims, things happen randomly, but each random event has a certain probability associated with it, so, although absolutely anything could happen at any moment, it’s more likely that more probable events will occur (although there’s zero guarantee that these more probable outcomes will be realized).
The Soul God There are two entities that have dominated human thinking and faith from the dawn of civilization: God and the soul. Even though they have been obsessively discussed for thousands of years, by countless people, including many of humanity’s greatest geniuses, the number of people today who can actually answer the simple questions, “What is God made of?” and “What is the soul made of?” is vanishingly small. Well, can YOU give the answer? If you can’t, isn’t it time you started studying Soul Science? Soul Science, as it turns out, is also God Science – because God is a Hive Mind made of souls. Souls turn out to be the foundational energy units of reality, the basic building blocks of existence. Scientific materialism, which scoffs at the very notion of souls and God, doesn’t scoff at infinite universes, at existence jumping into existence out of non-existence, of free will being an illusion, of cats in special boxes being alive, dead and alive-dead all at once (!), of humans being talking food (seriously!), of consciousness being a meaningless epiphenomenon, or miraculous emergent property, which can in no way override materialism and its laws, hence is absolutely pointless and wholly contrary to Occam’s
razor and the principle of sufficient reason. It’s very selective about what it regards as absurd. Religious absurdity is always condemned and mocked. Scientific absurdity is never regarded as absurd and never mocked. Science is a subject that concerns spacetime material immanence. Souls, by contrast, belong to the transcendent immaterial domain of frequency, hence are literally outside science’s paradigm, which breaks down at singularities – exactly where God and souls are found! Where science fails is at an ultra-precise point, the Source of existence, which is none other than a mathematical energy point, a Singularity, of eternal and necessary monadic mathematical minds. Science collapses at the most basic question: “What caused the Big Bang?” Terence McKenna observed, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.” There are no miracles. The true science of existence replaces science’s free miracle with an exact solution – a mathematical mind, which exists as a transcendent, immaterial Singularity made of pure sinusoidal energy. Energy in itself is not material, it is mental. It does not have dimensions. It is zero-dimensional, exactly as required by Occam’s razor and the principle of sufficient reason. Some
scientists
will
tell
you
that
reality
comprises
1-dimensional
energy
strings vibrating in an 11-dimensional spacetime. They claim this is the answer to existence.
In
fact,
reality
comprises
0-dimensional
energy
sinusoids
in
0-
dimensional souls in a 0-dimensional Singularity, creating an all-powerful Hive Mind aka God. This transcendent Hive Mind, a mental Singularity, is responsible for everything. The Big Bang was the creation of the immanent universe of matter from the transcendent domain of mind. The Hive Mind has nothing to do with woo woo. It is a system of ontological Fourier mathematics linking individual frequency domains (mind singularities) to a collective spacetime universe. All the mysteries of mind, life, qualia, subjectivity, free will, the unconscious and consciousness reside in frequency singularities and have nothing at
all to do with spacetime matter, as scientific materialism would have you believe, given its absolute faith in mindless, lifeless, meaningless, purposeless, pointless matter, which randomly jumps into existence from nowhere for no reason! This isn’t a mystical universe, or a material universe, or a universe of faith. Nor is it a scientific universe. It is in fact a mathematical universe and has a precise formula which shows exactly what souls, God, matter, and the spacetime universe are all made of. They are all made of the same thing. Why wouldn’t they be? Occam’s reason and the principle of sufficient reason demand it. Isn’t it time you actually started trying to know what the soul is rather than having simple faith in it, or believing you can mystically connect to it? Isn’t it time you became an expert in soul science, given that your whole life, and existence itself, depends on it? And here’s the great news, it’s all in the math. All you have to do is the math and you will know everything.
The Mathematical Soul As soon as you introduce mathematics into religion, spirituality and metaphysics, you get rid of the bullshit, just as mathematics cured physics of a lot of its bullshit. Ontological mathematics cures physics of all of its surviving bullshit, especially as regards quantum mechanics. Why can’t physicists understand quantum mechanics? It’s because they think of it in local, spacetime, material, immanent terms when in fact it’s defined by the non-local, frequency, the immanent and the transcendent. Quantum physics is foundationally about singularities, but physics is about spacetime. You cannot understand transcendence via immanence. Reality comprises transcendent entities (monadic minds) projecting, between them, an immanent world of spacetime and matter. Unless you understand this ontology of quantum physics – how the transcendent domain constructs and everywhere penetrates the immanent domain – you have no chance of understanding quantum reality and have to start invoking randomness, probabilism, statistics, uncertainty, indeterminism, indeterminacy, wavefunction collapse, cats that are simultaneously alive, dead and alive-dead (!), and so on.
When you have the wrong paradigm for understanding something, you obviously have to add bizarre interpretations (misinterpretations) to try to explain something. Quantum physics needs a paradigm that generates the immanent (spacetime) from the transcendent (frequency singularities), but science rejects the transcendent. It has to replace it with something, and what it replaces it with is all the nonsense about randomness, probabilism and uncertainty. Monadic frequency singularities performing ontological Fourier mathematics get rid of all the weirdness and idiocy spouted by quantum physicists and turn quantum physics into a system of strict certainty and mathematical determinism. But this is determinism that involves self-determinism, hence freedom of action with regard to the rest of the universe on behalf of autonomous monadic minds. In science, there is no self-determinism, only other-determinism and indeterminism, and therefore free will is impossible since there is no agent in science that can determine its own considered actions using only its own resources. For some bizarre reason, people look to indeterminism rather than self-determinism as the basis of free will. Indeterminism is in fact as hostile to free will as immanent determinism (i.e. other-determinism) is. Imagine you were walking along the road and your arm suddenly shot up into the air, thanks to indeterminism. You couldn’t possibly argue that this was a free action on your part. You didn’t know anything about it and had no control over it. Indeterminism can’t explain free will in any way. Only self-determinism can, and selfdeterminism relies strictly on transcendence, i.e. an order of existence (of singularity minds) outside immanence (spacetime). The soul – the eternal monadic mind – is not some freaky nonsense (on a par with the nonsense science spouts about alive-dead cats (!) and talking food), but pure, analytic math. The soul is simply a transcendent quantum wavefunction of the mind that docks with the immanent quantum wavefunction of a spacetime body. Why would anyone find that baffling? One day, it will be regarded along the lines of 1 + 1 = 2. There will be children in the future who are taught this in primary school and who will never once doubt the existence of the eternal, monadic soul. It will be the most certain fact in their lives, with all the math to prove it. You know it. That day is coming.
Something and Nothing People get really confused when it comes to something, nothing, and net nothing. If you can’t grasp the difference, you are lost. Two simple equations clarify everything: When we say that everything comes from “nothing”, we are not referring to equation 1). This would be absurd. Science in effect says that the universe randomly jumps into existence out of non-existence. It claims, in effect, that 0 = 0 morphs into 0 = 1 – 1 or 0 = 1 + (-1). When we say that everything comes from “nothing”, we are referring to equation 2). We are saying that 0 = 0 can be completely discounted (because it concerns nonexistence), but that something = nothing is the basis of all existence and the foundational truth of existence. It is impossible for something = something to be true because reality would not be in its compulsory Occam’s razor ground state (of nothing) and a sufficient reason would need to be supplied for the violation of Occam’s razor and the principle of sufficient reason. If existence can be explained entirely via something = nothing, which it can be and which it must be, then something = something, even if it were possible (which it isn’t), could never be reached in the first place since reality would stop at its simplest existential solution: something = nothing. So… Do you see how straightforward it is to analyze existence without doing any observations, any experiments, any science, without having faith or engaging in mysticism? No one needs to pray, believe, meditate, try mindfulness. All you need to do is conduct rational and logical a priori deduction such as to satisfy the fundamental principle of existence, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and its corollary, Occam’s razor, the principle of maximum simplicity. The answer to existence is the simplest and most rational, not the most complex and least rational! It’s exactly because we know that existence must be maximally simple, rational, logical and stable that we know exactly what the answer is: pure mathematics. Reason and logic alone explain existence. Everything else is total manmade human nonsense driven by emotional hysteria, demented mystical intuition, or sensory mania. Everything except mathematics can be dismissed as irrational and illogical gibberish. 1 + 1 = 2. 1 + 1 – 2 = 0. Get it?! By the way, nothing at all (non-existence) => everything (all existence) … where the symbol => denotes a random operation (devoid of a sufficient reason) … is logically and mathematically impossible. This impossible equation is of course none other than
science’s demented account of the Big Bang! If it were true, which it isn’t, then everything => nothing at all would also be true, and all of existence could vanish at any instant, back to non-existence (don’t worry, it can’t). So, by a simple analysis of the concepts “something”, “nothing”, “net nothing”, “nothing at all”, “everything”, existence, non-existence, all existence, randomness, and so on, we can arrive at a definitive explanation of existence. Everything is handled conceptually, deductively, rationally and logically. All other considerations are manmade impositions and fallacies (based on the feelings, senses and mystical intuitions) and lead to the radical falsification of reality.
Food and Humans “For food is changed into the truth of human nature.” – Thomas Aquinas (mentioning an objection to Christianity’s “truth” that men will arise immortal) According to scientific materialism, this objector to the Christian truth is correct: a human being, from a scientific point of view, is just reconstituted food, drink and air. According to science, humans are talking food! Who knew? They don’t teach you that in science class. Forget the Bible’s talking snakes. Science’s talking food is where the action is! Aquinas wrote, “Objection 2. Further, Adam’s rib belonged to the truth of human nature in him, as ours does in us. But Adam’s rib will rise again not in Adam but in Eve, else Eve would not rise again at all since she was made from that rib. Therefore whatever belonged in man to the truth of human nature will not all rise again in him.” Does this count as philosophy? Or is it story commentary?
Soul Wavefunctions Reality comprises sinusoidal monadic minds. That’s it. There’s nothing else. This is the definitive answer to existence arrived at by the application of the PSR and its corollary, Occam’s razor. Imagine that reality was made of just one monad. What would reality be like? The monadic mind would do just one thing: from its constituent sinusoids, it would spontaneously generate spacetime data. This basic process is what is called “dreaming”.
The mind generates its own content, which seems alien to it. It is not aware that it is actually the author of this material, that the content is its own construct. Its own mental productions seem strange and baffling, a great mystery to be solved. But another mode of mind is possible in dreaming: lucid dreaming. The lucid dreamer knows he is dreaming. While he is not in complete charge of the dream and cannot control it absolutely, he can certainly direct it to his considerable satisfaction. But what does this imply? It tells us that the dreamer experiencing the dream is different from the dreamer making the dream. In this distinction, we can see the seed of the distinction between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. The mind is not some simplistic, monolithic entity. It has many different modes and potentialities. It is based on simple principles but the underlying simplicity produces enormous complexity, just as the twenty-six simple letters of the alphabet lead to countless complex books based on them. It’s also crucial to understand that the monadic mind is immaterial and the spacetime world it creates in its dream is also immaterial. Although the mind experiences a dreamworld as a real, solid, extended world, located outside the mind, this is just a mathematical illusion. A dreamworld is a dimensional projection within a mind. It does not extend outside of the mind. It is not an independent, external reality. The No.1 fallacy of materialism, and thus of science, is that the material world has nothing to do with mind and exists prior to, and outside, mind. In fact, materialism asserts that mind is constructed from matter (in some unexplained way). All of these considerations are false. A dreamworld, apparently solid and real, is a mental construct, a mental projection, wholly bound by mind. When you look at a sleeping person who is, unknown to you, in the midst of the most enchanting dream, you of course see nothing but the sleeping person. You don’t see the dream at all. You have no idea it is happening. The dream doesn’t erupt out of the dreamer’s head. There is no sign at all that the dreamer is experiencing a vast and vivid dreamworld that seems entirely real to him. The dreamworld exists in a purely subjective space. It does not interact with objective space. It’s also crucial to understand that, in dreams, the dreamer can construct many different people, and give them things to say and do. The mind is astonishingly versatile and creative. It can simulate anything it chooses to.
In its own dreams, the mind has all the powers of God. It is the Creator. It is the master and author of all it surveys. It doesn’t make dreams out of nothing at all, as the Abrahamic God allegedly does, it makes it out of itself, its own mental content, its own basis waves (sinusoids, which, ontologically, are basis thoughts). We talk about ontological mathematics being a system of information carrier (syntax) and information carried (semantics) – in other words, the quantitative, rationalist aspect of information that we can understand and its flip side, the qualitative, empirical aspect of information that we directly experience. What is a thought? It’s not some free-floating abstraction. It’s an entity with an ontology. A thought has both a syntax (its quantitative aspect) and a semantics (its qualitative aspect). As we are thinking, we directly experience our thoughts (i.e. their semantic, phenomenal content). We definitely do not experience the syntax, the quantitative mode, the structure of the thought. This is the noumenal form of the thought. It’s permanently hidden from phenomenal experience, and this is exactly why empiricism is a catastrophic ideology – it ignores the structure, the syntax of reality. Empiricism claims that all knowledge comes from experience, but experience concerns only the phenomenal content of thinking, the semantic aspect of thought. We never under any circumstances experience what the thought actually is: its ontology. We don’t experience its epistemology, metaphysics, physics, form, syntax. The noumenal domain is always inherently concealed from our experience because it’s the flipside of experience and you can’t access the experience and what the experience is made of any more than you can experience heads and tails at the same time when you toss a coin. Our mind, experientially, is 100% attuned to the semantic aspect of thoughts. Our minds regard the information carried as concrete (what we experience) and regard the information carried as abstract (what we don’t experience). This is the whole problem with science. Science regards matter (phenomenal information carried) as concrete reality and it regards mathematics (noumenal information carrier) as an unreal abstraction. Step One of the scientific method is to “Observe”. This automatically means that science is restricted to the information carried, the content, the qualitative aspect, the observable, empirical, “concrete” side of things. Yet because all experiences are in fact carried by quantitative, syntactic information carriers (even though they are never experienced as information carriers) then the experiential world, despite itself, has measurable, quantitative structure visible
everywhere, i.e. noumenal structure can’t help but manifest itself in the world created from it, even though it isn’t seen directly. So, we can say that the underlying, noumenal syntax of reality has a phenomenal aspect that is very much observable. This phenomenal aspect is not the noumenal syntax itself, but, rather, its observable, experiential effect. It’s this phenomenal structure that science studies and measures, and tries to work out what reality is on the basis of this alone. Science has no clue that observable, phenomenal syntax – all the patterns we see in the world – are underpinned by rationalist, innate, mathematical syntax that we never phenomenally encounter in any way. Rationalism is the rival system that asserts that all knowledge comes from logical, rational deduction and that innate, analytic ideas built into reality form the only secure basis of knowledge. Rationalism is the subject that studies rational syntax, while empiricism is the subject that studies empirical semantics, but the latter could not exist without the former. Calamitously, empiricism ideologically rejects rationalism exactly because it cannot be experienced (because it is the carrier of experience rather than that which is experienced). Rationalism does not rely on any observations, feelings, experiences or mystical intuitions. Rationalism relies only on reason and logic, which is exactly why it is pure mathematics. Science uses mathematics yet it is fundamentally against mathematics because it is fundamentally against rationalism and denies that there is an innate syntax to reality that is accessible to reason and logic but can never be observed under any circumstances. If you privilege observation over everything else, you can never be on the side of reason, logic, mathematics and rationalism. That’s a simple rational and logical fact. Science is not the friend of reason and logic. It’s their enemy. It opposes everything they stand for. They are excluded from the scientific method (no reference is made to them in the scientific method). Observation is all. The empiricist paradigm begins with the injunction To Experience. For sensing types, this means observation. For feeling types, it means emotional experience (how something makes them feel). For mystical intuitives, it means some great vision or epiphany, accompanied by a highly unusual peak emotional state, making them feel they have broken through to some higher reality.
The rationalist paradigm is totally different. It begins with the injunction To Think. It proceeds entirely by way of reason, logic, deduction, mathematics, and a priori analysis. It’s a totally different way of relating to reality: syntactically rather than semantically, and for exactly that reason it is rejected by almost all of humanity. The average human regards semantic, empirical reality as real, concreate reality and correspondingly regards syntactic, rational reality as unreal, abstract and manmade. That’s why average humans hate mathematics so much and are so opposed to rationalism. Nothing could be more alien and strange to them. They live by their experiences and are totally oblivious to the fact that their experiences must be conveyed by something with a rational, logical syntax that they will never once experience. Mystical intuitives seek to transcend “reality” but what they really want is the experience of some higher state of being, to be absorbed into a great, comforting Oneness. It never once occurs to them that transcendence, real transcendence, actually means transcending experience itself and switching to the other side of reality, the other side of the coin, namely the quantitative, syntactic, rational, logical, mathematical aspect of reality, which is where all true knowledge and understanding reside. Empiricists want to experience their way to ultimate knowledge. Emotionalists want to enter into total, absolute, unconditional love with reality in itself. That’s their great dream, and it usually revolves around the ultimate lover: God, or some God substitute. Mystic intuitives believe that if they meditate hard enough, if they become “mindful” enough, they can reorient their thinking enough to enter into communion and union with the great Oneness (another version of God, basically). Sensing types would love to be able to observe all of reality all at once. Only observation seems real to them. You cannot experience your way to ultimate knowledge. Knowledge is about reason and logic, not experience. Empiricists base everything on experience yet don’t even know the first thing about the real nature of experience. What is an experience? What is it made of (what is its ontology)? What epistemology does it reflect? What physics and metaphysics applies to it? How does the experience of love fit into “scientific” reality? How does it relate to matter, to lifeless, mindless atoms? What is an intuitive’s mystical vision a vision of? What is the source of the vision, what is the source of reality? Why is existence possible at all?
Experience can’t explain anything. The experience of being alive doesn’t tell you what life is. The experience of having a mind doesn’t tell you what mind is. The experience of being in love, or in hate for that matter, doesn’t tell you what love or hate is. The experience of observing the universe doesn’t tell you what the universe is. Experience is more or less useless in knowledge terms. It’s mostly anti-knowledge. Knowledge is not its game. The game of experience is what it says on the tin … experience. Experience is the desired end, not knowledge. No one experiences knowledge. Knowledge is something you acquire conceptually. Animals have experiences. They don’t have knowledge. They don’t have concepts. They may be able to carry out simple problem solving at a very basic level, but they don’t have the vaguest idea what reality is. They don’t need to know. Equally, 99% of humans have no clue what reality is, and it has never held them back. They have enjoyed experiences galore, however. Endless experience has no correspondence to endless knowledge. You can have a trillion experiences and know literally zero about what reality is. If you add up all the experiences of all humans, it adds up to a vast repository, but how many humans know shit? If you make no attempt to acquire knowledge, you never will acquire it, as humanity has so relentlessly proved. If all you care about is experience, experience will be exactly what you get, not knowledge. Humanity has had every type of experience imaginable. Every individual has had experience galore. How many humans have knowledge of reality? Practically zero. That’s because the experience of reality is totally different from knowledge of reality. Knowledge is about syntax, experience is about semantics. All the experiences possible would reveal not a single thing about the true nature of reality. You could observe the world forever and know nothing about it. You could be in love forever and know nothing about reality, or even understand what love is, for that matter. You could meditate forever and know nothing about reality. Meditation is no path to enlightenment. Knowledge is. How can you make the most use of experience unless you know what experience is in itself? Only once you know experience – which is to say you know it as syntax – can you maximize your experiences (as semantics). You cannot reach semantic “enlightenment” until you have first attained cognitive, knowledge-based, syntactic enlightenment, based on reason, logic and mathematics. That’s the last thing the empiricists want to hear! They despise the very idea of it, which is exactly why they will never be enlightened.
The basic model of monadic life is that of a mind dreaming and being baffled by and alienated from the dream. It doesn’t understand the dream. It doesn’t know what’s happening to it. It’s having many vivid experiences, some delicious and some nightmarish. It can’t make any sense of this succession of weird experiences. It cannot discern any meaning or purpose. Do you see what’s going on? Experience in and of itself explains nothing to you. It tells you nothing. You are clueless about what experience is and what the point of experience is. You are certainly having experiences, but you have no control over them, and you don’t know what this strange experiential world is all about. Why is this happening to you? The basic monadic experience isn’t a reassuring one. The whole experience is disconcerting, disorienting and frequently disturbing. However, let’s imagine that the monad can jump to a higher level. It can switch from a passive mode, of having experiences done to it, to an active mode, where it has much more control over what it experiences. This active mode is known as lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming allows the dreamer to shape the experiences he has, and generally make them much more pleasant, but the lucid dreamer still has no idea what he is, what dreams are, why he’s in this situation, and what it’s all about. He’s not “enlightened” in any way, although he feels far better off than the passive dreamer. Having considered just one monad, let’s now imagine a vast collection of monads. Let’s imagine that all of these monads started out in passive dreaming mode, experiencing only their own mental content. Then imagine that, after a while, they progressed to lucid dreaming mode. So far, so good. But where do things go after that? What’s next? How does this system explain itself? Why does the system exist at all, and where, if anywhere, is it heading? Thus far, we have been discussing monadic minds as private entities, as “windowless”, with no way to see or interact with other monads. Each monad is locked in its own world. Even if it evolves to lucidity, it’s still nowhere near understanding what reality is. Lucidity does not lead to understanding, just to more control over experience and therefore to better experiences. For empiricists, this is in fact all they really care about. A meditator has zero interest in knowing what reality is. A meditator sees his objective as entering into union with ultimate reality (the Oneness), which he believes will lead to the best possible experiences – bliss (nirvana, paradise, moksha, heaven, or whatever) –
and this is his precise aim … to optimize experience. It’s certainly not to optimize knowledge. The maximization of experience is what empiricists call “enlightenment”. Of course, it’s nothing of the kind. If a person becomes infinitely happy, are they enlightened, or just maximally happy? The only possible real meaning of enlightenment is that it leads to total knowledge of existence, of why everything exists, of why the universe operates as it does, of what your role in the whole enterprise is. Becoming “infinitely happy” doesn’t enlighten you in any way, although empirical emotionalists may desire nothing else. Philosopher Robert Nozick spoke about people being hooked up to an “Experience Machine”. If people could come along and attach themselves to the Experience Machine and instantly become infinitely happy, and remain in that state forevermore, would you consider such people enlightened? In what way would they be enlightened? All they did was plug themselves into a machine, and it delivered an experience they desired. Is that what qualifies as enlightenment these days? The person attached to the happiness machine could tell you nothing about what existence is, why you exist, why he exists, why the world exists, what the purpose is, what the meaning is, what the point is, what happiness is. He could tell you only that if you plugged into this machine you too would be infinitely happy. Does that constitute revealing the secret of enlightenment? If so, you have an incredibly degraded notion of what enlightenment is. You have reduced to it to nothing but an experiential state supplied by a machine! Or let’s say that the Experience Machine delivers infinite love and light, to satisfy the emotionalists. If you could plug the love and lighters into a machine that delivers infinite love and light, haven’t you thereby brought their search for the “Truth” to an end? They wanted infinite love and light and they’ve now got it – thanks to a machine. Is that all that these people want … to be given a specific experience, but magnified to maximum extent? Is that the point of their existence? Is that what it’s all about? A non-emotionalist couldn’t imagine anything worse. You might as well have a lobotomy. Or let’s say that the Experience Machine gave you the capacity to observe every part of the universe. You could zoom in and look at anything you liked, to an infinite degree. That would keep all scientists happy, but what would they learn about existence from an infinite number of observations of existence? Anything at all? Seriously!
Wikipedia says, “The experience machine or pleasure machine is a thought experiment put forward by philosopher Robert Nozick … It is one of the best known attempts to refute ethical hedonism, and does so by imagining a choice between everyday reality and an apparently preferable simulated reality. If the primary thesis of hedonism is that ‘pleasure is the good’, then any component of life that is not pleasurable does nothing directly to increase one’s well-being. … Nozick attacks the thesis by means of a thought experiment. If he can show that there is something other than pleasure that has value and thereby increases our well-being, then hedonism is defeated.” For 99% of humanity, hedonism is all they care about. They are all Last Men and Ignavi, constantly searching for trivial happiness and pleasure. They never take on any great challenges, any awesome tasks. Wikipedia says, “Nozick asks us to imagine a machine that could give us whatever desirable or pleasurable experiences we could want. Psychologists have figured out a way to stimulate a person’s brain to induce pleasurable experiences that the subject could not distinguish from those he would have apart from the machine. He then asks, if given the choice, would we prefer the machine to real life? … if pleasure were the only intrinsic value, people would have an overriding reason to be hooked up to an ‘experience machine,’ which would produce favorable sensations.” Don’t people behave exactly like this? Look at how many people take drugs, alcohol, opioids, prescription drugs, and so on, and so on. Look at how many people vegetate in front of TVs, game boxes, box sets, YouTube videos, social media, and so on. Aren’t these all “experience machines”? Aren’t prayer, meditation, and mindfulness experience machines? The whole empiricist schtick revolves around experience ultimate experience machine of course being the human body itself.
machines,
the
Nozick believed that happiness requires pleasurable experiences that are “in contact with reality,” so his claim was that if offered the chance to plug into a machine that delivered exclusively pleasurable experiences, people would reject this offer. What planet do people like Nozick live on? What is religion if not an experience machine people plug into to shield them from reality and give them a fantasy of infinite pleasure to come? What is meditation all about if not the promise of infinite pleasure to be attained? What is mindfulness about? What about prayer, ritual, spirituality, Mythos? They’re all in the same game: offering a fantasy world to allow people to escape – in their mind – from the shithole they’re actually in.
Religion, spirituality, story, entertainment, distraction, social media … all of these count as effective Nozick Experience Machines and they totally refute Nozick’s hypothesis. Most people are addicts, craving experiential highs. (Knowledge highs are of zero interest to them. No heroin addict wants to immerse himself in a math book!) Wikipedia says, “Addiction is a chronic brain disorder consisting of compulsive drugtaking and seeking that is maintained despite detrimental effects on various aspects of life including health, relationships, and work. Laboratory procedures can establish compulsive self-administration habits of seeking and ingesting that qualify as addictive behaviors. Rodents and non-human primates have been shown to work in a compulsive manner to receive intravenous injections of stimulants, and when access to the drugs is not limited, they will self-administer drugs to the point of severe weight loss and death.” Isn’t that a description of creatures doing anything to hook up to an Experience Machine? A few meditators, a mere handful, might imagine that becoming One with ultimate reality will lead to gaining all knowledge of what ultimate reality is, but they put no effort into imagining what that might be like. What would constitute “all knowledge”, “a total explanation of everything”, “an account of why existence exists at all and if it has any purpose, meaning and point”? No meditator ever meditates on such things. The Buddha claimed to be enlightened but didn’t offer any explanation of what reality actually is, hence wasn’t enlightened at all. All he cared about was “suffering” and “bringing an end to suffering”. In other words, he was just an emotionalist, with a mystical propensity. A few scientists imagine that there is an equation to explain all of reality. How would constant observation reveal what this equation is? The equation itself isn’t an observable! As for love and lighters, well, they have zero interest in knowledge. They simply want to experience unconditional love. They have no interest in anything else. They don’t want an explanation of love, an account of why it exists. They just want the feeling itself.
Knowledge is despised by most people. What they want is experience, beautiful experience that fully satisfies whatever experiential craving they have, whether it be emotional, intuitive or sensory. Reason and logic don’t appeal to them at all. Thinking isn’t their thing. It never is for empiricists. A rationalist seeks a rational and logical explanation for existence. A rationalist isn’t looking for a feeling, a perception, a mystical vision. Whatever the Buddha thought enlightenment is is definitely not what a rationalist regards as enlightenment. Whatever a meditator thinks enlightenment is is definitely not enlightenment to a rationalist. Isn’t that amazing? Even the word “enlightenment” is utterly contentious. It’s a different thing for different people. Enlightenment, unless it is Absolute, is not enlightenment at all. Only rationalists understand this. That’s why there are so many falsely enlightened people in the world, so many false awakeners spreading utter nonsense about enlightenment. These people are all relativists and subjectivists. “Enlightenment” for these people becomes whatever they personally want it to be. It’s always made in their own image. This means that anyone anywhere can convince themselves they are special, they are enlightened. That, of course, is exactly why meditation is so popular. Anyone, with no qualifications at all, no knowledge at all, no conceivable explanation of reality at all, can say they meditated and reached “enlightenment”. No one can contradict them. After all, it’s a subjective experience. That’s all that meditation can ever offer. It’s as subjective as a private dream. People love subjectivity because anyone can claim to be an expert and they don’t have to prove anything, or explain anything. They just need to assert their own expertise, their own greatness, their own specialness, their “own truth”. Subjectivity is the conman’s best friend. It’s what the charlatan relies on. The fraud must never be placed in the position of factually explaining anything. Look at the Buddha. He claimed to be enlightened for decades, yet what did his “enlightenment” consist of? He absurdly claimed that life is suffering and then he gave his personal solution to what the cure for suffering is. Was it a great answer? Obviously not. The vast majority of people are not Buddhists. Whatever the Buddha was selling, most people weren’t buying. What does a rationalist expect of an “enlightened” person? The rationalist wants the answer to everything, the infallible, absolute answer. What did the Buddha provide for a rationalist? Nothing at all. The Buddha said, “I teach only suffering and the cessation
of suffering.” Actually, mate, you taught your subjective impressions of suffering, and your subjective formula for ending your own suffering. It’s not clear that you even succeeded for yourself, never mind for anyone else. And you made your wife and son miserable by walking out on them! You imposed suffering on others in order to bring about the “end of suffering”, the end of your suffering, not theirs. Sheez! It’s totally bizarre that people such as the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and so on, are taken seriously. To a rationalist, these people didn’t say a single thing worth knowing. Literally 100% of what they said can be dismissed instantly. They never made any contribution to the cause of reason and logic. Any book on mathematics is more valuable than all the contributions of mainstream religion and spirituality put together. A humanity that studied books on mathematics rather than praying, meditating, playing video games and watching box sets would be living in paradise by now. Humanity is basically full of beasts, of knuckle-dragging primitives. They have a staggeringly low interaction with knowledge. That’s because they are empiricists. Empiricists, by their nature, are not interested in knowledge. They are people of the body, not of the mind. The Gnostics believed in three types of people: pneumatics (the people of the spirit), psychics (the people of the soul) and hylics (aka sarkics, the fleshly, the people of matter). In these terms, the vast majority of human beings are hylics – materialists/em-piricists. At best, some of these people have a touch of soul. But the people of knowledge, of the mind – the pneumatics – are extremely rare. If you want to be enlightened, you must overcome your hylic nature, not indulge it. The way to transcend your physicality is to become a person of reason and logic. These are not “embodied”. Feelings, perceptions and mystical intuitions, by contrast, are all embodied. These are exactly what you need to escape from. These define the human condition. Reason and logic define reality. If you want to escape the material plane and get in touch with reality itself, you have to switch to reality’s way of understanding itself. It does so via reason and logic. People don’t want to transcend the human condition. They want to indulge it to the maximum. That’s why they will never be enlightened.
Every time someone tells you that you must “embody” your knowledge, that’s when you know they’re talking shit. You must do the exact opposite. You must become disembodied. The task is to become angelic – a person of the mind. Each monadic mind is a singularity, and thus the collection of all monads is a singularity too. If all monads were “windowless”, they would be unable to interact with each other. Each would have to evolve entirely on its own. However, monads are in fact windowed. They can “see” each other and interact with each other. In fact, by the mathematical properties of sinusoids, monads are able to share sinusoids within a certain frequency band. All of these shareable sinusoids exist in a Singularity, so have no difficulty in interacting with each other. In a manner of speaking, they are all in exactly the same place. This means that monads are not doomed to dreaming separately. They can all dream together, but when minds dream together, their collective dream becomes something qualitatively and quantitively different from an individual dream. All individual dreams are subjective. Only the individual dreamer experiences it. No other dreamer can access it. It’s very different with the collective dream. All dreamers experience it. Every dreamer can access it. This is therefore an objective dream, and we don’t call an objective dream a dream. We call it objective reality. In a subjective dream, the individual mind can change any detail of the entire dreamworld at whim. In the objective world, no individual can change any detail of the entire world at whim. In the objective world, you can change the world only where it intersects with your physical body (your avatar), the only thing in the world that you directly control. You can change any detail in your own dreams because there’s no one to stop you. You can’t change any detail in the objective world (except via your body) because you are up against the resistance of every other monadic mind in existence. In the objective world, no individual will rules, which means that the objective world reduces to its lowest common denominator state, that of pure default syntax. This is exactly why the objective world seems mechanical, lifeless, purposeless … “scientific”. It’s simply obeying pure default mathematical law. No individual mind is directing it to do anything.
Yet, like a self-solving Rubik’s cube, it is in fact relentlessly engaged in solving a universe-wide syntactic problem: how to reach the optimal syntactic state. That state is an exact one: zero entropy. At zero syntactic entropy, all semantic qualities are optimized. Reason is maximized, logic is maximized, perception is optimized, power is optimized, thought is optimized, intuition is optimized, love is optimized. This is the God state. All the monads acting together create a collective wavefunction – the wavefunction of the “physical” universe. This, like all wavefunctions, is both syntactic and semantic. The syntactic aspect of the wavefunction is the mathematical wavefunction. The semantic aspect of the wavefunction is the world we actually observe. Yet this is by no means the whole story. Just as we have a visible body and an invisible mind, the objective visible world has an objective invisible psyche. This objective psyche is what Jung called the Collective Unconscious. This is the domain of archetypes. The physical world is controlled by the syntactic laws of wave mathematics, which we might call mathematical archetypes. The more conventional archetypes are semantic archetypes. These evolve in tandem with the life forms of the world. How do animals, without consciousness, without language-based intellect, without access to concepts, reason, logic, analysis, and so on, decide what to do? They use instincts. But what are instincts? Instincts are the processes that carry out archetypal instructions. Jung described the archetype as the “self-portrait of the instinct”. It’s the instinct’s perception of itself. It’s the mental aspect of a biological instinct. When an animal behaves instinctively, it’s not a case of its body automatically doing certain actions (as a scientific materialist would have you believe). Rather, instinctual behavior is actually stereotypical mental behavior translated into stereotypical physical actions. If you lack consciousness and the ability to intelligently and adaptively react to a situation, the only thing that will save you in a tight spot is carrying out archetypal (instinctual) responses built into your species. Archetypes are how all mental entities carry out basic thinking without doing the sort of considered thinking that constitutes intelligent free will. Why are humans the masters of the world, while all other animals on earth remain very firmly in the narrow niches conferred on them by evolution? Humans alone are
generalist thinkers. All other animals are particular, archetypal thinkers. Conceptual language allows humans to escape from archetypes. With conceptual language, humans can learn and can think up literally endless new ideas. This capacity to keep introducing ideas renders stereotypical, archetypal behavior redundant. Archetypes are for situations where nothing much changes across millennia. Humans rule this world because language allows us to invent new behaviors second by second. We aren’t stuck with instincts. That said, the vast majority of human beings – especially those that believe in ancient religions – still behave in the same way as the humanity of long ago. They are locked into human traditions that serve in effect as human archetypes. Conservatives are people who cannot keep up with change and always want to do things in the ways they have always been done. Conservatives are much more archetypal than progressives. The most progressive people of all are the smartest humans, the geniuses. They are the least in thrall to primitive archetypes. The world wavefunction doesn’t just serve up the physical world, it also serves up all the archetypes required to give all plants and animals a basic psyche. The human psyche at birth is totally archetypal, and then is rapidly altered by education, by language-acquisition, into a psyche that can manifest consciousness, which is to say highly adaptive decision-making. The more educated you are, and the more literate you are, the more conscious you are, and the better able you are to understand yourself and avoid primitive archetypes (the bestial Shadow, so to speak). In rather loose terms, we can say that there is an immanent collective wavefunction (the spacetime universe of matter, coupled with the Collective Unconscious) that is everywhere penetrated by transcendent monadic minds. These minds, the more conscious they become, can inject more and more free will into the world, and pull it further and further away from archetypal behavior. When Abraham agreed to murder his son because a voice in his head commanded it, that was archetypal behavior, not a conscious man responding to an outrageous and evil suggestion. Strictly speaking, the universal wavefunction is holenmeric/ holographic, meaning that the whole (the transcendent Cosmic Mind, made of transcendent individual monads) is in every part (the immanent Cosmic Body of spacetime and matter).
There is nothing baffling about souls and how they interact with bodies. Souls are individual transcendent wavefunctions that link to individual bodies (avatars) in the immanent spacetime wavefunction of the Monadic Collective. Although the immanent spacetime wavefunction is just a single collective wavefunction, it can be functionally treated as a vast collection of sub-wavefunctions corresponding to individual objects or bodies in spacetime (albeit they are all “entangled”). The key step in a soul linking to a body takes place, of course, at conception. Biologically, it would seem that a new life is formed when a sperm and egg fuse. Wikipedia says, “Fertilization occurs when the nucleus of both a sperm and an egg fuse to form a diploid cell, known as zygote. The successful fusion of gametes forms a new organism.” Mathematically, this is not what produces a new organism. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. It is an immanent process, but lacks the key transcendent element. When the egg and sperm fuse to generate a cell that contains the code (DNA) for a new life form, this is an immanent process, but life itself is still not present. Life is transcendent, not immanent. The new cell is a wavefunction in the immanent universe, related to the body, the avatar, the vessel, the container. For life to actually be given to the cell, for the cell to be animated, the wavefunction of a transcendent monad has to dock with the wavefunction of the cell. This creates the defining transcendence/ immanence coupling that constitutes the mind-body relationship central to our existence. Science gets nothing of this because it rejects mind, it rejects soul, it rejects transcendence, it rejects the ontology of mathematics. The soul is not magical and mystical. It’s not an object of faith. It’s simply an individual mathematical wavefunction that links to a sub-wavefunction (body) in the collective immanent wavefunction. It’s literally all in the math. A transcendent mathematical wavefunction docks with an immanent mathematical wavefunction. What’s hard to understand about that? Why is that regarded as in any way mysterious and unscientific? Once a transcendent soul (an immaterial frequency singularity) has learned to dock with an immanent body (a material spacetime avatar), it has all the information it requires to engage in reincarnation. Each time its current body dies (the link between the transcendent soul and immanent body breaks down due to wear and tear, ageing, disease, accident, cell mutation, and so on), the soul has the wherewithal to dock with a new body and enjoy a new life.
The better the soul becomes at the docking procedure, and the more knowledge it gains of reincarnation, the better able it is to exercise control over the reincarnational process and choose exactly the body it wants. Most people have no clue about reincarnation, and their monadic soul links to a new body in a haphazard way. They exercise no control. One day, someone will be awarded a Nobel Prize for explaining the precise details of the docking procedure between a transcendent, individual soul wavefunction and an immanent, collective body wavefunction, and this will stand as a decisive moment in human history. It will be the moment when humanity becomes fully religious and spiritual, but now in an entirely rational and logical way. All faith, mysticism, emotionalism, Mythos, tradition and superstition will be abolished. At last. Thank God!!! A soul docking with a body is not an observable process. It’s mathematical, not scientific; rational not empirical. The soul can be understood only mathematically. Just do the math. You know it.
Conclusion “Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.” – Friedrich Nietzsche The idiotic ideology of scientism (extremist materialism and empiricism) has prevented humanity from seriously exploring the most important thing of all – our own soul! Thanks to scientism, humans have become alienated from themselves. They have turned away from themselves. Materialists consider themselves robots, devoid of free will. They believe the universe is meaningless, purposeless and pointless. These people are nihilists. They are disastrous for human beings discovering the truth of their own existence.
Science is a heuristic modeling system with use value. It is no kind of tool for studying existence itself. It has nothing to do with the truth. Science is predicated on matter, something that doesn’t actually exist in the terms required by science. The notion that dead matter produces life is absurd. The idea that unthinking matter produces mind is ludicrous. The belief that non-sentient lumps of matter can produce sentience, the unconscious and consciousness is laughable. The claim that objects can create subjects and qualia is ridiculous. The belief that un- free things can generate the “illusion” of free will is comically silly. The assertion that matter – a temporal and contingent construct – can explain eternal and neces- sary existence is insane. Why are all these bizarre, irrational and illogical claims of scientism given a free pass? Why is there no general discussion of the essentially mad claims made by so many scientists? The eternal mind – the soul – is the basis of existence. It’s the fundamental unit of existence. Souls are the building blocks of reality. Everything in the universe is caused by, generated by and created by souls. Souls use their sinusoidal content to make the universe. Everything derives from souls and their sinusoidal basis waves. It’s time to get onboard with the reality of souls. Over the old temples of the Mysteries was inscribed the message, “Man, know thyself, and thou shalt know the universe and God.” Isn’t it time you knew your- self? Isn’t it time you understood what your soul is made of, how it functions, what operations it performs, and what it’s seeking to achieve, i.e. the meaning of your life?! Otherwise, what’s the point?! The collection of all souls is God, the amazing Cosmic Hive Mind, the true Cre- ator of the universe. What could be more mind-blowing than that? Nietzsche said, “I go in solitude, so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think; after a time it always seems as if they want to banish myself from myself and rob me of my soul.” Don’t let anyone steal your soul, and don’t sell it to the highest bidder. It’s all yours! It is you. Do right by it.